Search

What happens if we eliminate a product or category and there are answers and incidents assigned to that item?

Environment:

Products, Categories, Answers, Incidents

Issue:

We need to delete a product and category, but have answers and incidents assigned to them.  We need to assess the impact or effort of re-association prior to removing them. 

Resolution:

Changing the Order of Products or Categories

If you are simply changing the display order of your products or categories and drag and drop the item to a new location in the list, incidents and answers retain their product and category association. In addition, if you change the order of sub-products that are listed under the same product (or sub-categories listed under a common category), incidents and answers keep their product and sub-product or category and sub-category association.

Moving Sub-Items to Be Parent Items

Incidents and answers behave differently if you are moving a sub-item to be a parent or a parent to be a sub. This includes the following actions:

• Moving a sub-product to be a product value
• Moving a product to be a sub-product
• Moving a sub-product to be a sub-product for a different product value 
   
• Moving a sub-category to be a category
• Moving a category to be a sub-category
• Moving a sub-category to be a sub-category for a different category value.

Incidents: Incidents retain their relationship to the sub-item involved (the item being moved). For example, if an incident is assigned to the product / sub-product combination Printers / LaserJet and LaserJet is moved to be its own product, the incident will now be associated with the product LaserJet.

Similarly, if an incident is assigned to a product named Digital Cameras and that product is moved to be a sub-product under Photography, the incident will be associated with Photography / Digital Cameras.

Answers: Answers are affected differently depending on which version your site is on. It is recommended to perform testing in a test environment to confirm results prior to making production changes.

When you move an item, the answer retains the relationship to that item.  That is, if an answer is assigned to a product and that product is moved to be a sub-product, the answer is assigned to the sub-product.  Similarly, if an answer is assigned to a sub-product and it is moved to a different parent, the answer retains it's association with the sub-product. This behavior is the same when using Knowledge Advanced.

Deleting Products or Categories

You cannot delete a product if any answers are associated with it.  A Dependency Conflict error will come up and the operation will be aborted.  You must associate the answers to other products before you can delete it.

If a product or category is deleted, any incidents (resolved and unresolved) that are associated with that value will be reset to 'No Value' for that value.  If you would like the incidents to be associated with a different product or category they will need to be re-assigned. If a sub-product or category is deleted, the incident will retain its association to the top level product or category.

For additional information on editing and deleting products and categories, refer to Answer ID 645: Adding, editing, or removing Service products or categories

Deleting Products or Categories when using Knowledge Advanced 

If your site is using Knowledge Advanced, the behavior is a little different. Products or categories can be deleted if they have articles associated with them, as the visibility of articles is controlled by the view(s) associated with the content. As a best practice, prior to deleting a product or category review the "Answers by Product" or "Answers by Category" report as appropriate. Then, modify the products or categories associated with those articles and only delete the product or category once there are no more articles associated with it.