Product Administration Guide > Managing Products with Components >

About Auto Match

If a quote, asset, or order contains a product with components configuration based on an out-of-date version of the product, Auto Match can compare the old version with the current version of the product and make limited changes to bring the quote, asset, or order up to date automatically. The user does not have to configure the product again.

Auto Match works as follows:

• Auto Match is triggered when the system determines that the version in the quote, order, or asset is not the current version.
• Auto Match compares the relationships and their contents in the quote, asset or order to the current version of the product.
• Auto Match identifies items in the old version that are not in the same relationship as items in the new version. An item can be a product or product class. These items in the old version are misclassified items. The relationship containing them is the old relationship. The relationship in the current product that contains the items is the new relationship.
• If the old relationship and the new relationship have a common parent, typically the product root, Auto Match will automatically move the items to the new relationship in the quote, order or asset. Auto Match does this by either changing the relationship name or by adding a new relationship.
• If the old relationship and new relationship do not have the same parent, the user receives and error message and must configure the product again.
• If the current version has a lower max cardinality for a relationship, this cardinality is enforced in the version in the quote, order, or asset. For example, the cardinality of Relationship A has been reduced from 10 to 8 in the current version. In a quote, Relationship A contains 10 items. Auto Match will remove two items from the quote.
• If a relationship has been removed from the current version but is included in a quote, order, or asset, Auto Match will attempt to move its items to a relationship at the same level. For example, Relationship A, containing 10 items, has been removed from the current version. A quote has the previous version of the product with components, including Relationship A with 10 items. Auto Match will try to move all 10 items to other relationships at the same level, while observing maximum cardinality restrictions. Any excess items are removed.
• Auto Match only compares the physical structure of the product's current version to that in the quote, asset, or order. It does not consider configuration rules. For example, if the old version contains Product A, and Product A would be excluded in the new version, Auto Match does not detect this.
• For products with attributes, Auto Match checks to see whether any of the required attributes have not been specified.

Auto Match is implemented as a business service and is not enabled by default. To turn Auto Match on, see Enabling Auto Match.