WebSphere Commerce Enterprise

Creating a contract that can be referred by other contracts

A contract can refer to another contract. For example, contract A can refer to contract B. Thus, a buyer who is entitled to contract A will be entitled to all the terms and conditions from contract A, as well as to all the terms and conditions in contract B. A base contract must be in active state to allow customer contracts to refer to the base contract. You may not suspend or cancel a base contract if there are active customer contracts that refer to the base contract. Once you have specified that a contract should refer to another contract, you can change the reference, but not the fact that the contract refers to another contract.

The validation of a contract is not performed on base contracts. You may create a contract without buyer participants and without pricing and shipping terms and conditions. You can deploy this contract, but a buyer will not be able to purchase directly against a base contract. Contract validation is done on the contract that refers to a base contract. For example, the validation rule that states that there needs to be at least one pricing term and condition in a contract is done on the combination of terms from the contract and the base contract. Therefore, there must be at least one pricing term and condition in either the contract or the base contract.

Procedure

  1. Create a holding organization for the base contracts.
    Follow the instructions in Creating an organization. A holding organization is not associated with an account, but can be referenced by the organizations beneath it. It holds any number of base contracts.
  2. Create a user under that organization to assign as the representative.
  3. Create an account for the new base contract holding organization and ensure that you select the This account is for base contracts check box on the Account Customer page of the Accounts notebook within the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator.
  4. Create all the base contracts under the new base contract account.
  5. Specify a contract to refer to this contract by using the Contract notebook within the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator. Select the contract to refer to on the General Information page of this notebook.