External Enfore APIs

Product features

In the enfore platform, products have various properties that are explicitly modeled in the Product data structure and its subresources. For example, the product's name, management unit, sales price/quantity, etc.

Naturally, not all properties of every product in the world can be modeled. Trying to do this would work against the goal of the "MetaCompany" model being suitable to all kinds of businesses. Therefore, the enfore platform has a generic way to express custom product properties by the way of "product features".

In short, "product features" allow custom properties to be declared by the merchant for any of his products. Those custom properties can be organized in various ways and can be configured to be shown in different UI contexts as needed by the merchant.

The domain model for "product features" mainly consists of the data types FeatureTemplate, ProductFeature and various types of FeatureValue/FeatureValues.

A FeatureTemplate exists independent of any Product and describes a custom property (without actually assigning it to any Product yet). The template has a name, type, value type, a list of possible values and various additional information. For example, a tailer shop might define a feature template named "Color" with the type COLOR and the possible values of "Red", "Green", and "Black". And it might also define a feature template named "Arm length" with the type SIZE and the possible "length" values of 30cm and 26cm.

Note that the "possible values" declared as part of a FeatureTemplate consist of both the definition of the value type and the definition of the actual values. The type is mandatory and static but the actual values may change over time.

In addition to the type, feature templates can also be organized by category and group. Categories are predefined by enfore (currently only SPECIFICATIONS and INGREDIENTS exist) whereas groups can be defined by the merchant (although enfore does provide a couple of pre-defined groups, e.g., "allergens" or "dietary information").

Once a feature template has been defined, a Product can declare a ProductFeature to define that "this product has that feature/that custom property". The ProductFeature references a FeatureTemplate and (optionally) specifies a value (from the ones allowed by the template). E.g., the "Green Shirt" product may have the features "Color" with value "Green" and "Arm length" with value 26cm.

The value in the ProductFeature is optional so we can support some advanced use cases:

• Products with variants (where the variants are implicitly defined by feature value combinations)
  E.g., Product "T-Shirt" with variant-defining features "Color" (values red, green, blue) and "Size" (values S, M, L) would have the 6 variants red/S, red/M, red/L, green/S, green/M, green/L, blue/S, blue/M, and blue/L
• Products with feature values that differ by Lot
  E.g., Product "Red Roses" with feature "Stem length" defined "per Lot"

Feature types & values

Each product feature must be assigned a type and a value_type. Most also have a list of possible values (in the template) and a value (in the product/lot).

Since product features are effectively object properties, they always have some kind of value, at least from an abstract interpretation.

Take for example a product like a "Shopping bag". It could have the following properties:

• Material = Cotton
• Base color = Grey
• Highlight color = Red
• Weight = 350g
• Volume capacity = 10l
• Weight capacity = 15kg
• Size = M
• Food safe = yes
• Washable = yes

The type of a feature defines the semantic type of the feature's value. The following feature types exist:

The value_type of a feature defines the technical type of the feature's value. The following feature value types exist:

Note that the feature type limits the allowed feature value types:

Feature categories & groups

To organize features, merchants can use feature categories and feature groups. Both are use to determine which features are displayed where in the UI. For example, the product info view will use a tab for each category and then group the features of each tab by feature group.

Feature display configuration

Giving merchants the option to declare custom properties for their products is only useful if those custom properties are also visible in the client UI and/or on business documents.

For this, each FeatureTemplate and ProductFeature provide a "display configuration".

A FeatureDisplayConfiguration allows the merchant to choose an icon (from the list of built-in icons) and a color (from the list of defined "highlight colors") and specfiy a list of "UI contexts" in which the feature shall be shown.

The configuration on the FeatureTemplate serves as a blueprint for the configuration on the ProductFeature. It is copied from the FeatureTemplate on creation of the ProductFeature but is then "detached" from it (i.e., the configuration on the ProductFeature doesn't update when the configuration on the related FeatureTemplate is modified). For the actual display, only the configuration on the ProductFeature is taken into account.

Icons

The enfore platform defines a right set of icon to choose from.

Since there are too many icons to list them all here (and the icon set gets extended all the time), please refer to the source repo.

Colors

The enfore platform currently defines six highlight colors to choose from:

• GLUE
• GOLDEN
• PURPLE
• TEAL
• YELLOW

When no specific color is chosen by the merchant, a generic fallback color is automatically used.

Display contexts

The enfore platform defines the following display contexts for product features: