Adding of Free fields (features/attributes):
In Business Central you open the Sales -> Items ->Item Attributes. In this screen you find the already defined fields on the item. As here displayed on the image:
In this menu at least 1 extra free fields must be added. These free fields are attributes to which the product is variable. For example, the colour of a shirt, or the size of a shoe. This field does not have specific requirements, other than that this must be at least one. A configurable product without attributes is not possible.
The other two required fields are automatically added when installing the ApiCenter App required for the integration. These two fields are added to the Item Card in Business Central. The first field is a Checkbox field and the second field must be a string field referencing other products. One field to indicate whether a product is a configurable product and one field to indicate to which configurable product the item belongs to.
When these are added this will look something like this:
Filling attributes per product:
With configurable products you have 2 types of products for the creation of products creating products. You have the physical product, for example, the red T-shirt in size 38. And the (what we call) the display product, this display T-shirt does not really exist as a physical product but is actually a container for all colors and sizes of this model . This display T-shirt also has no stock, but for a integration it is essential as an existing product.
The two types must be completed in the same way as the example above. Of course there are many types of configurable products, but the essence is always the same, you have 1 container item and 1 physical item. In the image above you see variant product with the reference to the main product.
Configuring in ApiCenter
When the Business Central Application environment has been fully populated with data described above, it is time to set ApiCenter to the correct configuration, to load in variant products and their parents.
First; you will need to specify which attribute is mapped to which attribute in the secondary application. Remember, an attribute is what makes a product unique, like size and colour for example. Do not include features in this mapping table.
Secondly; you need to define the features of a product. Remember a feature is what all variants of a model share, like the material the product was made from, or the country of manufacture for example.
Thirdly; it is very important to set the defining attribute, to specify where the parent product reference can be found. If this setting is not set, ApiCenter will not recognize your product as a parent-variant pairing.
