Cascading Evaluation

Conditional associations are evaluated using data from a product order as well as its containing service order. A data element whose name matches the condition specification can be in the service order, the incoming product order, or the technical product order being processed. Fulfillment Provisioning Catalog looks for this data in the following order, and uses the first that it finds:

  1. In the dataset of the technical product order being processed

  2. In the dataset of the original incoming product order

  3. In the dataset of the enclosing service order

This feature is sometimes referred to as dataset inheritance.

More than one of these datasets contains a data element with a matching name, only the first one (the lowest-level one) is used.

Note:

If product order and service order contain identically-named data, the PO may unexpectedly "mask" the SO data during condition evaluation.

For example, suppose there is a condition "QoS equals Gold", and the service order has QoS=Gold. If the technical product order being enriched has QoS=Silver, then the condition would not be met even though it is true in the service order.

You can bypass the default cascading evaluation by explicitly specifying a particular dataset to evaluate. Refer to the Fulfillment Provisioning User 's Guide for information on alternate dataset evaluation.