Variable value not passing to catalog item from order guide via rule base

[jamesturney]

Hello All,

 I'm creating an order guide to manage all of our applications available to request access to. Each application has it's own catalog item to manage the different approvals and tasks via workflow. I have everything working correctly except 1 variable and I cant figure out what's going wrong. Here's a rundown of what I have and the outcome.

I have a variable set used for the employee information, it's used on the order guide as well as each catalog item then I have a rule base set up to transfer the values from the order guide to the catalog items. 

Within the variable set the requester is auto populated based on the user opening the form, this then auto populates their email, phone number, employee id, and branch. If the user changes the name in the requested for section it will re-populate all those fields to match. This all works as intedned. Due to us having some employees that do not get a user account we have the option to select user not found and all fields become free entry. This also works and moves over to the catalog items.

Where the problem lies is the gm variable. Each Branch (cmn_department) has a GM(primary_contact) that is the approval authority for all of applications that require an approval. This is dependent on what is selected in the branch field. I have the variable GM set up to auto populate and it works when filling out the initial page of the order guide, it even changes if the branch changes. Now when you move to the next page "choose options" this fields value does not carry over and remains blank. It does however fill in if the branch is changed. 

Does anyone have an idea of why this is the only variable that's not carrying over for me?

[Brad Bowman · Accepted solution]

The variable Auto-Populate feature was new in the Utah release, and as of a certain patch # there were some bugs with it, so that might explain this behavior, unless you are on Vancouver or later.  Other things to check are any Catalog Client Scripts or Catalog UI Policy that applies to the Catalog Item, or variable set if gm is in one, that might be setting or clearing the value when the Catalog Item loads.  You mentioned the Rule Base in the post title - are you using the Cascade Variables feature on the Order Guide, or Item Variable Assignments on each Rule Base?  If not cascading, have you tried that, or is there a reason you're not using that? 

[jamesturney]

Brad thank you for the response. I don't know how I overlooked the cascading but that was 100% the fix for the issue. I was running in circles on this for the past couple days, again thank you!

[Brad Bowman]

You are welcome!  Not sure why that wouldn't work with Variable Assignments, but that must not play nice with the newer auto-populate feature.

[jamesturney]

That was my thoughts to, what was even more strange is before cascading the variables all the other variables worked without any issue.