Creating a contract that can be referred by other contracts

A contract can refer to another contract. For example, contract A can refer to contract B. Thus, a buyer who is entitled to contract A is entitled to all the terms and conditions from contract A and contract B. A base contract must be in active state to allow customer contracts to refer to the base contract. You might not suspend or cancel a base contract if active customer contracts refer to the base contract. After you specify that a contract refers to another contract, you can change the reference, but not the fact that the contract refers to another contract.

The validation of a contract is not performed on base contracts. You might create a contract without buyer participants, pricing, and shipping terms and conditions. You can deploy this contract, but a buyer can't purchase directly against a base contract. Contract validation is done on the contract that refers to a base contract. For example, the validation rule that states that there needs to be at least one pricing term and condition in a contract is done on terms from both contracts. Therefore, there must be at least one pricing term and condition in either the contract or the base contract.

Procedure

Create a holding organization for the base contracts.
Follow the instructions in Creating an organization. A holding organization is not associated with an account, but can be referenced by the organizations beneath it. It holds any number of base contracts.
Create a user under that organization to assign as the representative.
Create an account for the holding organization.
1. Name the account. Ensure that you include the following string in the account name: BaseContracts. Doing so ensures that you can successfully refer to the base contract.
2. Select the This account is for base contracts check box on the Account Customer page of the Accounts notebook within WebSphere Commerce Accelerator.
Create all the base contracts under the new base contract account.
Specify a contract to refer to this contract by using the Contract notebook within WebSphere Commerce Accelerator. Select the contract to refer to on the General Information page of this notebook.