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Products with components and the product class system both include hierarchies. However, these hierarchies differ in important ways. In the product class system, inheritance is used to propagate attribute definitions downward through the class system. By contrast, inheritance plays no role in the hierarchy of components in a product with components. Attributes inherited by a product with components because of its membership in a product class do not propagate to the component products in the product with components.

For example, a product with components belongs to a product class that has the attribute Color (red, green, blue). The product with components as a whole inherits this attribute but its components do not. For example, if the product with components is a laptop computer, this means the laptop comes in three colors, red, green, or blue.

However, these colors are not inherited by any of the components of the laptop. For example, if the laptop has a CD-ROM, it does not inherit these colors. The color attribute of the CD-ROM (if it has one) is defined in the product class from which it comes, not in the product with components in which it resides.

NOTE:  If a class relationship is assigned to a class that have subclasses, the products in the subclasses appear in the class relationship. For example, there is a parent class called Hard Drive and subclasses called Laptop Hard Drives and Desktop Hard Drives, both of which have products in them. If the relationship is on the Hard Drive class, the system will pick up products from both Laptop Hard Drive class and Desktop Hard Drives.

Siebel Product Administration Guide > Designing Products with Components >

About Relationships

You specify the components of a product with components by defining relationships. A relationship can be defined for a single product, a group of products, or the products in a class.

NOTE:  Relationships are also called ports.

The relationships you define for a product with components are component type relationships. This means the items in the relationship are components of the product with components. For example, you define a relationship called Hard Drives for the product with components Desktop Computer. You specify that it contains all the products assigned to the Disk Drive class. This makes the disk drives in this class components of the product with components Desktop Computer.

Relationships form the framework of a product with components. They are also the framework underlying the user interface you design for the product. For example, you sell configurable computers. The buyer can choose among several monitors, several keyboards, and several CD-ROMs when configuring a computer. You could create a relationship called Monitors, another called Keyboards, and one called CD-ROMS. You would then specify the products to include in each relationship. You could then design the user interface to present monitors, keyboards, and CD-ROMs each on a separate selection page.

When you design a product with components, begin by defining a framework of relationships. Keep in mind that each relationship represents a distinct, configurable part of the product.

Figure 3 shows a relationship framework in a product with components.

  • Relationship 1 contains a single product, Product 1
  • Relationship 2 contains all the products in product class, Class 1
  • Relationship 3 contains Product 2, Product 3, and Product 4, each from a different product class
    
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