To store additional information related to customers, orders, and users, you can use additional parameters called custom attributes.
How You Can Use Custom Attributes
Large resellers may need to integrate their IT systems (CRM or ERP) with CloudBlue Commerce. One of the purposes of this integration is storing external identifiers (IDs issued by reseller’s systems) next to objects of the platform.
Custom attributes can be used for various purposes. For example:
- To store the Vendor Contract ID for a usage-based service.
- To store a reseller's ID from another system: For this purpose, you can create and set the value of an attribute applicable to accounts.
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To store an order ID from an external system and propagate it to the subscription: For this purpose, you can create and set the value of an attribute applicable to orders .
Note: You can use attributes only when placing sales orders. No other order types accept them. Attributes applicable to sales orders, if propagated to a subscription, are also stored to all subsequent orders for this subscription and reseller transactions. If you change an attribute value in a subscription profile, the existing orders and reseller transactions keep storing the previous value.
Value of attributes applicable to orders is available in email notification templates. After you have created an attribute, you can instantly use placeholders of the following kinds for the attributes of the account and order types correspondingly: "@@Cust_<attrib_id>@" and "@@OrderAttribute_<attrib_id >@". For more details how to add custom attributes in email notification templates, see the Creating Notification template section.
After you have created attributes, you can mark them with attributes tags. Marking attributes with these tags will enable sorting the attributes by tags and applying only the necessary attributes in particular cases. For more details, refer to the Managing Attribute Tags section.
One of the use cases of custom attributes is the scenario with Purchase Order (PO) numbers. To learn more about this scenario, refer to the Configuring Purchase Order (PO) Numbers section.