Managing Product Categories

Product categories allow you to organize your product catalog into nestable groups across all of your configured price books. These groups can then be navigated to locate the desired product, as well as manage (such as activate or deactivate) all of the products associated with the category.

To access the Product Category page where you can create, edit, and mange your categories, click Product Categories from the CPQ Setup page.

Creating or editing a Product Category

• Click the +Add button to create a new category.
• Click the button to edit an existing category.

From the Category page, you can specify the product category options, including:

• The name of the product category (required)
• The exisiting parent category for the product category.
• The product category description
• The product category graphic

Additionally you can specify the Access Control options.

When you save the product, Mobileforce CPQ automatically populates the metadata values (such as Created Time) for the product.

Access Control options

Access Controls determine whether the categories, as well as the products within, are displayed from the MobileForce CPQ application.

Specify the following options:

Active: Specify whether the category is currently active. By default, the setting is set to Yes. To deactivate the category, the setting should be set to No.

ACL: The Access Control List (ACL) allows you to specify the CRM roles that are allowed to add the products in the category to a quote.

• Select All if users must have all of the specified roles in their profile to add the products in the category.
• Select Any if users only need one of the specified roles in their profile to add the products in the category.

Click the roles field and select one or more roles from the list.

Effective Date Click the field to select the date after which users can add products from the category to a quote.

Expiration Date Click the field to select the date after which users can no longer add products from the category to a quote.

Activating and deactivating product categories

When a product category is deactivated, you can no longer navigate to the product category when adding products to a quote.

You can deactivate the product when creating or editing the category, Additionally, you can deactivate category from the Product Categories page:

• To deactivate individual categories, click the icon for the category.
• To deactivate multiple categories, select the checkbox for the categories and click the Deactivate button.

By default the Product Categories page only displays active categories. To view inactive categories, ensure that the Show inactive checkbox is selected.

Deleting Categories

If needed, you can delete categories individually or delete multiple categories simultaneously.

• To delete a single category, click its delete icon () from the Actions column.
• To delete multiple categories, ensure that the checkbox for the categories are selected and click the Delete button.

Other Uses of Product Categories

Product Categories in Mobileforce offer some other benefits.

One Product in Multiple Product Categories

Mobileforce products can be in multiple distinct product categories, thus enabling a 1:many relationship.

Combining this capability with Form Expressions enables easy check/selection of products via form expressions on their product-categories, rather than one by one check of each product

Another benefit of products being in multiple product categories is that this makes it easy to perform an operation (such as a discounting operation), on a specific set of products.

1. Create a new Product Category named ‘Special Discount Products’.
2. Add all products for which a special discount is needed to this category. Note: this is in addition to the product categories that you'd add those products to, anyway.
3. Use the form expression PROD_IN_CAT(cpq_variable, ‘Special Discount Products’). Here, cpq_variable refers to Mobileforce CPQ system variables with the prefix cpq_ which are either quote-specific or product-specific system variables. Please see the article on "Form Expressions Language" under the category "Mobileforce Administration and Development" for more details.

All new products which require the special discount must also be added to this category "Special Discount Products" (in addition to any product categories they are already being added to).

Displaying Product Categories

Note: A seller or admin cannot display all the product’s categories in a quote. However, they do have means to test if a product belongs to a category within a form-expression or rule. This is achieved using the expression: PROD_IN_CAT(cpq_code, ’Some category’)