Changing the question/label of variables in variable sets per catalog item

[lars7]

Hi

I am working on enhancing the end-user experience on a client's Service Portal. Specifically, the client want more annotations/tool tips, in a standardized way, in order to better guide the users on what to select or type in when making a request. What we talked about, then, was to consolidate similar variables across catalog items into variable sets so that we can control the annotations/tool tips from one place, as well as reference qualifiers and attributes etc. which we put in everytime. One example could be a List Collecter variable on the sys_user table with certain reference qualifers and attributes which we use in many catalog items.

However, depending on the specific catalog item in question, the variable's question/label may often need to be worded differently for contextual purposes. And I guess we would then have to use catalog client scripts to change the wording. But that would kind of defeat the purpose of this exercise because it would just shift the complexity from having many similar variables to having many similar catalog client scripts. My question is if anybody else has had this kind of requirement and found a good solution to it?

[Chandresh Tiwa1]

@lars7 Please mark answer as Solved, if it works fine for you. Thanks!

[ryan_pope]

In my mind, the solution would be to just change the labels for the variables shared across multiple catalog items to be more agnostic and contextually relevant for all cat items they're used in. If that doesn't work, you're much better off just managing variables per catalog item. Introducing all of those client scripts to manage this, especially with callbacks or AJAX would ultimately start to really bog down the performance of the system. Variable maintenance will be a much lighter weight solution.

[lars7]

Yeah, this was also was I ended up concluding in the end.. sadly. It would of been nice not having to re-create similar variables over and over just for the sake of relabelling them. I found a sort of pseudu solution to the problem of standardizing reference qualifiers which is construcing the queries in a script include. At least in this way we have only one place to maintain and control that.