Defining Access Rights
Once the Structure and Controls step have been completed, your Configuration Process contains all the rules which are important for the structure of your Configuration Process or service. These rules are “product knowledge” and are inherent to the product or service which you are trying to sell.
However, on some occasions, the rules you’ve specified and which concern the structure of your Configuration Process have to be specialized. This can happen when the product rules that will define the structure of the Configuration Process defer in certain circumstances. Typically, these circumstances are workflow-related, and address issues that are not a part of the product or service itself but which are more about the business processes in which the configuration of these products and/or services intervenes.
These business processes make that some decisions you had to make concerning the product structure need to be review.
Some examples:
- In the product configuration process, the price is typically calculated by using the pricing rules in the model. However, a special form property would allow certain people (for instance: the sales director) to override certain default pricing rules and apply an exceptional discount. In this case, the form property would be considered as being “read-only” for most people, but modifiable by some.
- In the product configuration process, a part of the configuration is visible to all customers, however, another part is more technical and to be used by internally qualified people. In this case, a part of the model would be considered as being “visible” for most people, but “hidden” for some.
Although you could try and solve this situation by making the rules built in the Controls step more complex, the Access Rights step allows you to do this in an easier way, without having to modify the inside of BRC.
- Existence
- Visibility
- Required
- Updateable
Specifying a new access rights criterion
In order to specify a new access rights condition, proceed as follows:
How-To:
- [Via the Menu toolbar]
- Click on the Add alias function
- [In the popup window]
- Enter the alias name. Keep the name as short as possible because a column will be created for the alias.
- Construct the CPE corresponding to the alias.
- If the type of the CPE is not read-only, make sure that you choose the correct type
- Click on “OK”
- Result: a new column has been created representing your alias.
Adding access rights conditions
In order to add access rights conditions, proceed as follows. For each condition:
How-To:
- Specify the property to be overridden:
- [Using the CPE Explorer]
Browse to the CPE of the property you would like to override and drag & drop that CPE to an empty line
or
- [Using the CPE Builder]
Click on an empty line and use the CPE Builder to construct the CPE corresponding to the property you would like to control.
- [Using the CPE Explorer]
- Specify the value for the alias columns which you have added in the previous step.
- [If the criterion applies]
For the line corresponding to the property you are working on, select an operator and enter a value.
- [If the criterion does not apply]
Make sure that the operator as well as the value are both empty. This indicates that the criterion does not apply.
- Associate the new rule to the property:
[If the new rule for the specified conditions is fixed]
Choose the corresponding "TRUE" or "FALSE" value in the "fixed" column.
[If the new rule for the specified conditions is a BRC]
Create a BRC using the Add BRC function or drag & drop an existing one using the Filter Objects explorer.
- Save
- [If the criterion applies]