Class to Default Department Association

Overview

Default department resolving occurs as a weekly data validation step, assuming remote data access is enabled, and the store allows the same supplier to update departments and classes. Every class that exists locally in the store is compared with a corresponding class that exists within the cloud master catalogue. If the default departments of each class do not match, the default department of the local class is updated to match the default department from the master catalogue. This update to class records can be seen in the class_defaultDept column of the class data table.

Purpose

The purpose is to establish associations between Departments and Classes so that reasonable classes will appear under each department when clicked on in PaladinShop.

Note: This feature is specifically for editing in Paladin’s File > Setup > Class > Classes pane > Default Dept. field.

Note: To disable this feature, contact Paladin Support.

Feature Support

Currently, default department resolution supports Ace departments, Ace commodity groups, EJD, True Value, and Orgill, with more to come in the future.

Entry Point

Default department resolution is a weekly data validation step. This means the default department resolution process can be triggered by Paladin Service performing weekly data validation, or by a user via Paladin’s main menu: Maintain > Data Validation > Weekly Validation.

Prerequisite Settings

There are some cursory requirements that must be in place for default department resolution process to be performed. If any of the following requirements are not met, the default department resolution process is skipped.

• Remote Data Access must be enabled in Paladin Configuration: File > Setup > Remote Access. If this is not enabled, no data can be fetched from the master catalogue to compare classes with.
• There must be a supplier in Paladin Configuration: File > Setup > Supplier that has EDI services enabled, and that supplier must be able to update both classes and departments.

How Default Department Association Works, and What Can Go Wrong

During the default department resolution process, each class is compared to a corresponding class from the cloud master catalogue. If the default department for that class is different locally compared to the master class, then the local class is updated to associate to the proper default department.

However, there are a few cases where updating the default department of a class is not possible:

• If a store creates a custom class, it will not have a corresponding class within the master catalogue; therefore, there will be nothing to compare to, and its default department will not be updated.
• If the master catalogue class default department ID does not correspond to a department ID that exists locally, there’s no department to associate the local class to, and its default department will not be updated.

Once every class is processed, the number of classes changed is displayed to the user if the user forces the weekly validation via Paladin’s main menu: Maintain > Data Validation > Weekly Validation, or logged if the weekly validation was triggered by Paladin Service.