Populate a complete variant structure

There are two approaches to populating a variant structure—top-down and iterative bottom-up. The most common approach for simple products is top-down. A customer places an order and the salesman sets the values of the options in the variant rule, then creates a variant item for the top-level item. The variant item represents the customer order. The salesman then substitutes all the lower level modules with variant items, if they exist, or creates new ones if they do not exist. Alternatively, you can use an iterative bottom-up approach when the customer order can be adjusted to use variants items that are already available, as follows: The salesman uses an SOS at the top level of the structure to define the customer order; a variant item is not yet created. This action configures the entire structure. The salesman searches for variant items for each module to see if they exist. This is an iterative process-creating variant items and changing values on the SOS until a complete structure of variant items is created. The customer may want to modify the original SOS due to variant items that are available and satisfactory, but did not match the original specification.

Note You cannot push values for lower level saved option sets up to higher levels. When a complete set of variant items are located, the salesman confirms the top-level SOS option values are correct and verifies the configuration with the customer order. The salesman creates a variant item for the top level by saving the generic item with a unique customer name and prunes unconfigured structure lines. The children that are modules are still generic. Edit the structure by substituting the generic modules with the variant item that works for the SOS at the top level. Repeat step 5 for all other modules at all levels.