Item-to-client relationships
In this relationship, an item is related to a client.
You might need a client entity if you are a manufacturer or a distributor. You can assign product assortments to certain clients. For example, if you are a food distributor, you might need to assign which clients or businesses will receive a particular item. For data modeling, the concept of the client entity is the same as the supplier entity.
Because you are likely to have more than ten clients per item, you must model the item-to-client relationship as follows:
- By modeling the client as a multi-occurrence attribute: You can model the client as a multi-occurrence attribute on the item and within that multi-occurrence define a subset of attributes. This approach works well for a limited number of clients per item.
- By modeling the client as a hierarchy: You can model the client as a hierarchy and map the item to a particular entity (category). This scenario works well for a large set of clients per item, and is efficient in determining the list of items supplied by a particular client. However, this approach makes it difficult to determine the clients from a given item from the user interface.
An item can have multiple features. To store these multiple features, multiple attributes are required. For example, a printer can have feature 1: 1200 dpi resolution and feature 2: 15 ppm print speed. Feature 1 and 2 are multi-occurrence attributes. To mark each multi-occurrence attribute (feature 1 and feature 2), you need an occurrence variable (#abc). You must mark both feature 1 and feature 2 with the same occurrence variable #abc. In case of multi-occurrence, when the client runs a search, values of either feature 1 and or feature 2 are returned for the item, printer. You can design the rich search to search for any or all occurrence of a multi-occurring attribute (feature). For the multi-occurrence attribute, all or one of the values of the attribute (feature) are not matched and searched.