OE CPQ CoPilot

CPQ CoPilot

CPQ CoPilot is a VSCode IDE extension built to help Oracle CPQ (Configure, Price and Quote) developers and analysts manage CPQ assets easily and quickly.

What is CPQ ?

Oracle CPQ software helps businesses create products that users can configure to their expectations, determine the price of their configuration and create quotes for the same. In this blog, we will discuss only the configuration part. CPQ systems are very critical for businesses that need to sell configurable products. Not having the right CPQ product, one might end up taking an order for a car as shown in this picture.

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Why a New Extension?

You might wonder, CPQ already provides an online administration tool, and also provides developer toolkit, so why a new IDE extension now?

Oracle CPQ already provides an online tool with which the assets can be managed with a browser. But, the problem is that it is a time consuming and cumbersome process. I feel like I would have to replace the batteries in my mouse on a daily basis due to the sheer amount of mouse clicks needed to get things done. Developers will have to navigate several screens to achieve what they want.

Oracle CPQ Developer Toolkit, allows you to manage Commerce and Util BML Libraries using your favorite IDE and Code repositories. But it doesn’t provide any support for validating, autocompleting BML code.

We created this OE CPQ CoPilot to solve the above problems and help with improving productivity of using Oracle CPQ.

OE CPQ CoPilot Features

OE CPQ CoPilot provides functionality in two areas:

1. Ability to download, navigate and manage product hierarchy, attributes and rules in IDE
2. Enables auto completion, validation of BML Libraries

In this Blog, we will look at first set of features:

1. Navigate CPQ Catalog Hierarchy
2. Manage Configuration Rules
3. Search Rules

Navigate CPQ Catalog Hierarchy

The CPQ Catalog Hierarchy view provides a tree structure for navigating the catalog definition. Attributes and rules at each level are displayed accordingly. Below is a screenshot of this tree navigation. Clicking on a rule will bring the rule editor onto the right hand side pane.

Manage Rules

Clicking on a rule from the CPQ Catalog Hierarchy explorer view, the rule will be opened for editing on the right hand side pane as shown below.

Users can edit the rule attributes and the associated BML function scripts from within the same view. Once the rule is edited, it can be uploaded to the server with a single click of a button and after the upload is complete the status of the upload will be rendered right below within the same view as shown in the screenshot below.

Search

Sometimes when you are developing with focus you might see your manager or business analyst walking towards your desk. We quickly turn on the “it’s not my code mode” and be prepared. But sometimes, things turn out to be different, it could be a new requirement or an urgent fix or even something unrelated to work 🙂. To address this, we might have to do a quick search and maybe find the correct rule or attribute or for that matter any asset within CPQ so that the fix can be applied at the right place.

But doing this on the browser version, even though it’s possible, is a little complicated task. So to be able to “Search” quickly, this feature was added as part of the extension. From the search view, users can search for rules defined in the configuration area. For ex., following are some of the searches that the user can perform to search for a rule:

• Search within rules variable name, description, display name and other attributes.
• Search within the actual BML function script defined either within the actions or even within the conditions.
• Search all rule arguments that are passed to the BML functions and more.

For ex., in the below screenshot the user is searching for the term “AMD” and trying to find out all the rules where the text “AMD” is used within the condition section of the rules.

Upcoming:

In the next blog we will look at the features related to editing BML libraries.