Order guides design by department

[zynsn]

Hello,

We are trying to recreate order guides for new hires by department. From architectural perspective, is it better to have a separate order guide for each department compared to having a single order guide and then use client scripts to manage software access variables?

A potential downside of using a single order guide is that it may require a large number of variables to handle these requests. I am unsure of the best practices for the number variables on a order guide.

[Runjay Patel]

Hi @zynsn ,

If fields are common then use single RP and manage data visibility using Refrence qualifier, auto populate department based on login user to differentiate it.

And if you have different work flow for each department and set of fields the you should go with separate RP.

It will increase maintenance as you will be dealing with multiple RPs.

Accept the solution if it helped.

[-O-]

It will increase maintenance as you will be dealing with multiple RPs.

You mean it will decrease maintenance when dealing with multiple RPs.

E.g. if it is one RP, whenever you change something in it, no matter how small, you have the potential of braking it in its entirety, for sure you need to make sure it still works in its entirety.

If you have separate RPs, you only need to worry about it.

Not to mention work in parallel on the same huge monster will be a mess and will lead to everyone just overwriting the other person. A.s.o.

It is maybe development time that will be slightly longer.

[-O-]

Order guides should not have variables really.

Except ones that

- influence which Catalog Item to be included/available from inclusion and

- are common for the majority of included Catalog Items and would be cascaded from the Order Guide to the Catalog Items.

More to the point, if your software catalog is one where each software is a separate item, then

- you could have a department variable on the order guide and

- have rules for software items to be available for inclusion into the order based on that department variable.

Though this could potentially make the order guide quite a long form, when reaching the Choose Options tab.

[zynsn]

Our current order guide includes a Department variable and each software item in our catalog is represented as a software item. These software items are displayed as checkboxes on the order guide and we use rules to include the checked software items by mapping the checkboxes to catalog items.

However, we do have a requirement to hide certain software checkboxes based on the department dynamically. This current solution is making the form long with over 50 variables present on the form.