Product Hierarchies
Product hierarchies provide a structuring mechanism for modeling purposes within the product master.
Note
In the documentation about product hierarchies, “products” includes both products and objects.
Product hierarchies consist of categories and are used to group products according to different criteria. The purpose of a hierarchy depends on the business criteria involved and your company's requirements.
A hierarchy can be multilevel and used for control or informative purposes.
Structure
The categories within a hierarchy are arranged hierarchically. All lower-level categories inherit the product type and set types from the higher-level category. Additional set types can be assigned to lower-level categories.
An example is shown below (note that the set types shown are not standard set types, but examples of customer-defined set types):
If a product type is assigned to a category, only products of this
product type can be assigned to the category. Assigning a product type to
a category makes it possible to assign set types to the category. The set
types themselves appear as assignment blocks on the Product
and Object
pages.
To prevent a set type from being assigned to a product more than once based on different categories, the following rules apply when working with categories and hierarchies:
A set type may be assigned to more than one category within a hierarchy, but to only one hierarchy for each product type. Therefore even if two categories are in different hierarchies but have the same product type, it is not possible to assign the set type to both categories.
A product can be assigned to more than one category as long as the categories belong to different hierarchies. A product can therefore only be assigned to one category in each hierarchy.
NoteThe same rules apply to the assignment of relationship types.
End of the note.