Pricing Administration Guide > Creating Attribute Adjustments >

Using Variable Maps in Attribute Adjustments

You use variable maps to map the dimensions of attribute adjustments to fields in Siebel business objects. For information about variable maps, see Siebel Order Management Infrastructure Guide.

There are three types of variable maps:

• Context. This type maps the variable to header-level information—for example, to fields in the Order Header applet such as Account, Order Status, and so on.
• Row set. This type maps the variable to line item-level information—for example, to fields in the line items of an order such as Quantity, Product Line, Price Type, and so on.
• XA. This type maps the variable to the attribute names and values of a line item.

For attribute pricing, you need only the standard variable maps that are provided with the product.

The Siebel application provides standard variable maps for all of these variable map types. The variable maps that attribute adjustments use are declared in the Systems Preferences view as shown in Table 7.

While setting up an Attribute Adjustment table, the pricing administrators can associate the variable maps shown in Table 7 by clicking the Create Result Dimensions button. The three variable maps are created for the attribute adjustment in the Attribute Adjustments > Variable Maps view along with the two pricing results dimensions, Adjustment Type and Adjustment Amount. The system preferences, as shown in Table 7, are read and a record is inserted for each variable map type in the System Preferences view.

CAUTION:  If the system preference value is either empty, nonexistent, or invalid, then that variable map record is not created. No error message appears. If a user has already created the variable map records, then the application does not overwrite them.

The use of variable maps for attribute adjustments is transparent to the pricing administrator. The Variable Maps view tab does not appear in the user interface, but you can still access it using the Site Map to navigate to Administration - Pricing > Attribute Adjustments > Variable Map.

You can set up variable maps in either of two ways.

To set up variable maps for pricing adjustments by modifying system preferences

1. Navigate to the Administration - Application screen > System Preferences view.
2. In the System Preferences list, query for:

   PSP Pricing Var Map*

   Three records appear, as detailed in Table 7.

3. Set the appropriate variable map names in the System Preference Value field.
4. Restart the server.

   New attribute adjustments created after the server is restarted use the new variable maps declared in system preferences.

To set up variable maps for pricing adjustments by overwriting the variable maps in the Variable Map view

1. Navigate to the Administration - Pricing screen > Attribute Adjustments > Variable Map view.
2. Modify variable maps by selecting different variable maps in the picklists.

The first approach is a global level change, and any new attribute adjustment table created after the server is restarted uses the new variable maps. The second approach is a local level change, and only the attribute adjustment that is modified uses the new variable maps.