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Best Practices for Modeling Customizable Products

Before you start modeling in Advisor to connect to customizable products, consider the following:

• You should know the structure of the customizable products, including the exact names of the Relationships within the customizable product, and the names and values for the attributes you want to use.
• If you want to connect to a customizable product that has more than one level and pass off parameters to multiple levels, you need to use one of the following methods:
  • Subconfiguration, where the root of the child pageset is the child of the parent root product.
  • Create a string representation of the product yourself to pass off parameters. For more information on creating a product string by hand, see ISS.BuldProductStr in Siebel Advisor API Reference.
• You can pass incomplete information about a customizable product, but cannot pass incorrect information. For example, if there are five Relationships in a customizable product, but you want to connect to the customizable product by passing just one Relationship and one child within the selected Relationship. The connection would be successful as long as you have mapped the Root, Relationship Name, and Child Product correctly. However, if you pass an incorrect Relationship Name, Child, or Attribute Value, an error message reports this conflict. However, if you pass incomplete information, the resulting product may not be consistent with the rules defined in the server-based Configurator and incomplete products may be added when you use Add To Cart.
• If there is no one-to-one correspondence between user selections and attribute values or child product selections (which is normally the case), you can still model by creating Feature tables that are not mapped to input UI controls. To model without mapping to an Input UI controls, create TYPE (0) columns in the Configuration table to make appropriate rows active within the Feature tables. The active Feature table rows will be based on a combination of user selections in other user selectable Feature tables.