The Data Lookup option within Strategy Designer has the ability to access the Product Extension tables in our partition. Each of these lookups will return a value that can then be used within our custom pricing strategies.
A Product Extension data lookup will follow these steps:
Add Lookup
On the Data Lookups panel, select the Add Lookup and then choose Product Extension option:
This will add a new data lookup to our list with a default name of Product_Extension_1.
Lookup Name
We should always change the default name to something more meaningful using the Rename Lookup option:
NOTE: The data lookup name can be any combination of letters, numbers, spaces and special characters. Both upper and lower case characters can be used.
As an example, if we will be accessing our Product Cost table we might name it as:
Select Lookup Table
The default Product Extension set of visual blocks will be created and our initial step will be to select our Price Parameter table from the list of tables:
NOTE: The table names that are listed in this list will be the Labels associated with our tables and not the actual table names.
Once the table has been selected, then the set of attribute filters will be displayed for this table:
The number of attribute filters shown can be linked to the key search fields for our table. For example, for the Product Costs extension table, it has three key fields and they are shown as our filter attributes.
NOTE: All Product Extension tables use the product sku, but can have additional attributes to identify a unique row. In our scenario, the key search fields are validFrom, ValidTo and DependencyLevelName. To find a unique row, we would then need to create our filters based on these attributes and for the comparision use a literal value, product attribute or a parameter value.
Create Filter Condition
After selecting the product extension table, we can then create the conditional filter against the attributes that Strategy Designer has identified as relevant for searching. Depending on our requirements, we can use some, all, or none of these attributes as filter conditions.
NOTE: In the above example, we have created a filter condition on “Germany” for the DependencyLevelName attribute using the character option from the Math & Values area.
Live Preview
The Live Preview option will display all of the rows that match our search filters and also display the Value that is being returned for the attribute selected. Additionally, it provides a drop-down to allow us to select different product sku values:
NOTE: In this example, we are returning multiple result rows since not all of the search filters are used, to return a single unique role we would need to supply values for validFrom and validTo.