PO Forward Mapping
Each TPO that results from the PO decomposition, or used by a Prepend, Append or Substitute rule keeps a link with its initial POs when PO Mapping is engaged. These links will be used later during PO Backward Mapping to construct custom PO status based on TPO execution status.
The same TPO maybe related to multiple POs. Initial deep copy mechanism had to prefix all parameters' names to avoid confusion for parameters having the same name. This introduced high complexity in the logic manipulating these parameters that had to know/manage the prefix. PO Forward Mapping permits simplification of this problem by controlling what parameters need to be copied & transformed.
Once the decomposition is over, Fulfillment Provisioning Catalog executes the rules against the TPO list. As a result,
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target TPOs of each rule not yet listed are created.
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target TPOs of each rule are associated to the source TPO which keeps a link w/ all target TPOs.
Target TPOs of a rule can inherit from parameters of the associated source TPO using PO Forwarding Mapping mechanism.
As a summary, PO Forward Mapping engages after a TPO is associated to a parent PO following the decomposition process or to a TPO following the execution of a rule. This is similar to deep copy mechanism.
This engagement is not affected by early/late enrichment option which indicates if the parameters of the Technical Products (TP) defined in their patterns are copied into corresponding TPOs before or after the rules execution. The purpose of this option is to control if TP parameters can influence the rules or not.
PO Forward Mapping logic can access the rule name and target PO/TPO name to implement different transformation logics depending on what rule is the originator of the link to what PO/TPO.
PO Forward Mapping input information is stored in target dataset using the following parameters:
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#POFwdMapped of type sequence of structure consisting of parameters :
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#POFwdMappedIndex of numeric type indicating the current index in the sequence to be used
Each time PO Forward Mapping occurs, #POFwdMapped and #POFwdMappedIndex parameters are updated.