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Hi Stephen,

When you click "Save" the save method determines whether values should be applied to all variants or languages and updates all records in the database. Then the ViewModel engine simply reads from the record (instead of having to determine where to get the data from master or not).

So if you're updating the data through integration, you need to do it properly, otherwise you'll run into issues.

Hope that makes sense.

Nuno Aguiar

Yes that makes sense. As part of the integration, I only set the shortdescription / description on the exported records from ERP which are responsible for creating the master product records. It just seemed "cleaner" that way, as the data is anyway the same for all variants. So you are saying I should set all description fields to the same then? Is there really nothing in the standard viewmodel that can access the parent data?

Hi Stephen,

Yes, that is accurate.

I agree your initial approach looks/seems cleaner considering only the data, but at least in Dynamicweb, it's not as performant, when we need to consume the data.

Nuno Aguiar

Its also confusing with the field setting that restricts editing across variants. How is this used if a master record is not used when it's turned on? There has to be some form

of authoritative data?

Hi Stephen,

If I understood you correctly your expectation was that if you edited a field (i.e. Long Description) that should be the same across all variants, you wanted to be able to edit on any variant and have it copied (so that you don't have to edit the master record). I would find that much more confusing, because as a user trying to make sense of what's going on, it's harder to figure out what I need to edit per variant.

I guess it also depends if you're using DW9 or DW10, and Ecommerce or PIM to manage your data. In either case, if you're only handling the data through integration, does it matter? Do you have a hybrid scenario where data is integrated and then enriched in PIM/Ecommerce?

PIM can be configured nicely to handle the proper scenario you are dealiing with. It's not uncommon even in other PIM systems that you have this "hierarchy"/structure of fields, in which case you have to go to a parent/master records to edit the values that are common/shared to the child records (in our case variants).

Best Regards,

Nuno Aguiar