Building Child Products

With product variations in Product Experience Manager, you can create product variations and different options for each variation and use both to create child products for a product. Each child product is a unique combination of options associated with the product.

Child products inherit attributes from their parent products. When you make changes to the attributes of the parent products, you can rebuild your child products, ensuring that changes to the parent products are propagated to the child products.

Alternatively, you can modify a child product independently, without impacting its parent product. For example, you may prefer the status of your child product to be live, while keeping the parent product's status as draft. When you directly update a child product, it becomes independent of its parent product. In other words, any subsequent changes made to the parent product are not automatically reflected in the child product when you rebuild the parent product and its child products. Once a child product is independent of its parent, you cannot recreate the association between the child product and its parent. You must delete the child product and rebuild the parent to recreate the child product.

Following on from that, if you add the same flow to both a parent and child product, the child flow values are not affected by changes to the parent flow values in a rebuild.

Building child products is an asynchronous operation. When you build child products, a job is created. The jobId of the job is displayed in the response. When the job is complete, the build child products operation is also complete. You can use the jobId to see the status of your job using the Get a Job endpoint or see Jobs in Commerce Manager.

Using Build Rules

When building your child products, you can build all products related to a product.

Alternatively, you can build a combination of child products associated with a product, based on build rules that you specify. This is useful, for example, if you have a variation option that you do not sell. This makes managing and building your child products quick and easy. You can do this using build_rules. build_rules are combinations of variation option IDs that you wish to include or exclude when building your child products. See Build Child Products endpoint or Building Child Products in Commerce Manager.