Siebel Order Management Guide Addendum for Communications > Setting Up Network Ordering >

About the Compound Product Validation Engine

The Compound Product Validation Engine executes validation rules that cross product instances.

A compound product is a group of product instances in quote, order and asset tables that share a common key. A Frame Relay Network is an example of a compound product.

The Compound Product Validation Engine allows you to create rules that operate on a projected future state of a compound product that includes the current quote and any open orders on the existing assets. This future state is created and stored in the Projected Asset Cache object.

Overview of Compound Product Validation

Figure 166 illustrates how the Compound Product Validation Engine and its supporting components validate a compound product when a user clicks Validate.

Figure 166. Steps in Compound Product Validation

As Figure 166 illustrates, Compound product validation consists of the following steps:

1. Product manager defines the cross-product validation business services rules for the top-level product in the Product Validation view, Validation Services subview. For more information, see Defining Business Services for Rule Checkers.
2. Product manager defines the component cardinality rules for the top-level product in the Product Validation view, Cardinality Rules subview and enters basic validation rules in the Product Validation view, Product Validation Expression Rules subview. For more information, see Defining Maximum and Minimum Quantities for Network Components and Defining Simple Expression Rules for Compound Products.
3. The user creates a change quote for the compound product. The user validates the individual components using Configurator. After exiting Configurator and completing the network connections, the user clicks Validate. The Validate button calls a named method on the Quote Item business component, which calls the VORD Validate (Quote) workflow process.
4. The VORD Validate (Quote) workflow process determines the selected compound product instance. This workflow process also determines the future date for which to validate the network based on the latest requested date of quote line items for the network. For more information, see the Future Date step in VORD Validate (Quote) in the topic about creating custom rule checkers in Siebel Product Administration Guide. This workflow process then calls the Compound Product Validation Engine business service.
5. The Compound Product Validation Engine retrieves the compound product validation rules for the top-level product. For more information, see the Validate step in VORD Validate (Quote) in the topic about creating custom rule checkers in Siebel Product Administration Guide.
6. For each rule, the Compound Product Validation Engine calls the Pre-Validate method on the corresponding business service.
7. If necessary, the rule checker business service retrieves product specific data related to the rule (for example, the cardinality constraints for sub components of the compound product).
8. The rule checker determines the fields and attributes it requires and returns them to the Compound Product Validation Engine, which accumulates a list of fields and attributes that all rule checkers require.
9. The Compound Product Validation Engine prompts the Projected Assets Cache to retrieve the compound product instance limited to fields and attributes that the business service validation rules for the compound product require.
10. The Projected Assets Cache retrieves all asset records for the compound product. The cache then retrieves all open order line items due to complete before the specified due date and updates the records retrieved from the asset table to create a future state. All changes to the compound product instance in the current quote or current order are applied to generate the true future requested state.
11. For each rule, the Compound Product Validation Engine calls the associated rule checker business service method.
12. If necessary, the rule checker business service retrieves product specific data related to the rule (for example, the cardinality constraints for sub components of the compound product).
13. The rule checker business service queries the Projected Assets Cache to evaluate the rule (for example, the rule checker gets the bandwidth for each PVC connected to a node).
14. The rule checker business service returns a list of rule violations to the Compound Product Validation Engine.
15. The Compound Product Validation Engine accumulates the violations for each rule and returns them to the VORD Validate (Quote) workflow process.
16. The Compound Product Validation Engine business service displays the error message that the user defines in Message Types view.

NOTE:  The Compound Product Validation Engine operates independently of a customizable product definition. Furthermore, the engine validates only the top-level component and its immediate attributes. This note affects your modeling of network products.

Tasks of the Compound Product Validation Engine

The Compound Product Validation Engine is a business service that performs these major steps:

1. Finds and sets the future date to pass to the Projected Asset Cache so that only line items with a due date prior to the future date are loaded to the Projected Asset Cache.
2. Calls all the compound product business service rules for the product ID of the passed compound product and accumulates all the required unique fields and attributes in these business service rules.
3. Initializes the Projected Asset Cache and passes the cache the required fields and attributes as parameters. The Projected Asset Cache builds the in-memory future requested compound product instance.
4. Calls all associated business services and rules to operate on the in-memory object instance containing the future projected state of the compound product.
5. Aggregates the error messages for all the rule violations into a single error message to display to the user.

For details about each of rule checker business service methods, see the topic about creating validation rules for compound products in Siebel Product Administration Guide.

Projected Asset Cache

The Projected Asset Cache holds an in-memory version of the future requested state of the compound product instance. For information about the Projected Asset Cache, see Siebel Order Management Infrastructure Guide.