The Save as Bundle feature can be a super helpful feature for users that spend a lot of time ordering the same items over and over. Think about admin users that have order the same laptop or access for new employees.
If you are not familiar with this feature you can essentially take a snapshot of the items in your cart and save them off as a bundle for future use. When loaded in the future it retains the catalog items and all of the values you had previously entered. Though helpful it can also get you into some trouble.
1. These are static template so to speak. If your form had a specific value in it like a user or a date, it will also have these values in your bundle whether you like it or not. If you don't open the catalog item and edit it, you will submit with these values.
2. Since these are snapshots, any client scripts or UI policies will not re-evaluate when the bundle is loaded. Again you need to be careful.
3. If a developer updates one of the catalog items in your bundle, your submission will use the snapshot and will not account for these changes. The result could be an RITM with new fields that are empty, UI policies or Client Scripts that were never run, bad data being submitted, etc.
So you can see that though this feature is helpful it will more likely cause problems and there is a reason people tend to turn this off. Our organization relented and kept this feature on which causes problems from time to time as catalog items are updated. To reduce the problems I came up with a modification to the SC Saved Carts widget.
When the widget loads in the portal it will look to see if the user has any bundles and if they do it will look at the various catalog items in those bundles. It will check to see if any of the following have changed since the bundle was created/modified:
1. Were variables added?
2. Were UI Policies and Actions added?
3. Were Client Scripts added?
4. Were variable sets added?
5. Were variables added to existing variables sets?
6. Were UI Policies or Actions added to existing variables sets?
7. Were Client Scripts added to existing variables sets?
If any of these things have occurred then the user gets an error message on the screen telling them their bundle is out of date. It will also call out which catalog item has the issue and point them to a KB on how to fix this issue.
Of course this will not solve for all of the problems related to bundles. Ex, it cannot catch that a date in your saved catalog item is no longer valid. However, it will ensure that users are at least using the correct version of the catalog item.
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