Product Category Rules in Shopping Cart

[Former Member]

Hi All,

Currently trying to figure out the logic behind how the SRM system fills in the Product Category field in the Shopping Cart when taking an item from a Punch-Out Catalog. From what I've researched so far, how it is supposed to work is:

1. If a valid value is passed through NEW_ITEM-MATGROUP[n] then SRM should populate this.
2. If no value is passed then default value maintained in Ext. Attributes of Org. Structure is taken.

Are there any other rules that I'm missing? What if the catalog passes a valid Product ID, but no Product Category, will the system take the associated Product Category from COMMPR01, or will it take the default from org structure? In our tests we found that is taking the default from org structure, and I'm not sure if this is a bug, standard, or configuration issue.

Regards,

Andrew Bondarev

[ricardo_cavedini · Accepted solution]

Hello,

What I see frequently is when product category is linked to more than one logical system in SRM.
Then, an item is transferred from catalog to SRM and system takes the default product category from user and not the one available in the catalog item (which belong to more than one logical system).

For clarification on this you should look at note 395312 point #5:

If the system does not transfer the product category (Material group) or if it is replaced with the default product category, the reason of this system response is also that you have replicated the material groups repeatedly from the backend.
In this case, the system cannot determine any GUID for the material group because there are several entries in table COMM_CATEGORY. For this reason the system then uses the default category. Even here you only have the option to use the BADI and to fill the CATEGORY field in table ENRICHED_ITEM_DATA.

A requirement of product category transfer is a unique entry in the table COMM_CATEGORY as we search there initially by category ID not GUID, as more than one entry exists, the program chooses none and should select (if available) a default product category derived from the Organizational Model.

As the note mentions, the only way around this is to also entend the select by providing the category guid in the catalog transfer BAdi to ensure a unique select is possible.

I hope this input helps you.

Regards,
Ricardo

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Richardo,

Thanks for the response. We have already checked the table, and it doens't seem that there are duplicate entries for the Product Category.

We did just have a breakthrough though in that if we supress the fields NEW_ITEM-ext_schema_type and NEW_ITEMEXT_CATEGORY_ID[n], then the proper value is populated in SRM.

Note: We are performing the mapping on the APC side, so the value in NEW_ITEM-MATGROUP[n] is already the Product Category found in COMM_HIERARCHY. No mapping should be needed in SRM. I'm guessing that by passing a schema type and ext. category ID, SRM is looking for some mapping in SRM, but can't find it so it uses the value in the Org. Structure.

Now the issue is figuring out how to allow for the values  for Schema and Ext.Category to still be passed from APC, but have SAP ignore them.

Regards,

Andrew