Web publication rules in CustomerGate 365

What these rules are about

A rule is a standing arrangement, not a one-off choice. Use it for what you never want on the website: internal items, scrap codes, machine hours, packaging, and everything ever bought for one job. For a single item, the choice on the item itself is quicker and clearer.

Closing the page recalculates the whole catalog, and not at every keystroke: somebody filling in three rules one after another should not wait three times. To see what a rule does in between, choose Recompute Catalog.

The order, and what wins from what

The rules are the fourth of five steps. What is above them wins:

1. Blocked or Sales Blocked: off the website. Nothing overrides this.
2. The item itself, with Web Publication set to Published or Excluded.
3. The item category, the nearest one first.
4. These rules, in their own order. The first one that matches decides.
5. The policy Only Publish Marked Items on CustomerGate Setup, for everything nobody said anything about.

A rule on Blocked or Sales Blocked can therefore only exclude; publishing is refused. A blocked item is already off before the rules are reached, and a rule promising to put it back would be lying.

The fields on a rule

Rule No.

The order in which the rules are evaluated. This number comes back in the reason on the item, as Rule 40 with your own description behind it. Leave room between the numbers so something can go in between later.

Rule Type

What this rule looks at. The types are below.

Value

What the item has to match. For an item number that is a pattern, for an item attribute Name=Value, and for Blocked, Sales Blocked and Without Description you leave it empty.

Then

What happens to an item that matches this rule: Published or Excluded.

Description

In your own words, why this rule exists. The item stores only which rule decided; this text becomes the reason when it is shown, so a changed description shows at once on every item of that rule. Write it for the colleague who wonders in six months why an item is not on the website. If the rule has been deleted, the item shows Rule 40 (no longer exists).

Usable Here

Whether the field this rule looks at exists in this environment. If it says no, the rule never matches anything.

The rule types

A rule on an item category also matches the categories below it, so one rule on STEEL-INT covers the whole branch. Capitals and surrounding spaces never matter.

The pattern on an item number

An item number pattern knows exactly two wildcards, and nothing else:

• The star stands for any text, including nothing at all.
• The question mark stands for exactly one character.
• Without a wildcard the item number has to be exactly equal.

This is deliberately not a Business Central filter. In a filter, a double dot between two item numbers means a range, a vertical bar means two separate values, and several other characters carry a meaning of their own. A rule that turns out to be a range quietly takes the wrong four hundred items off the website, and nobody reading the pattern sees it coming. Here, two wildcards do what they look like they do, and nothing else.

A rule that can do nothing here

The Usable Here column says no as soon as a rule looks at a field that does not exist in this environment. That applies to Profile, Grade and Product Group: the first two are fields of iFacto Steel 365, and without Steel 365 such a rule never matches anything. That is worse than an error, because the rule is there and everybody thinks something has been arranged.

Item Type never says no: that type also looks at Business Central's own type, which exists everywhere.

Rules to start with

A setup usually starts with a handful of exclusions. These four come up almost everywhere:

Then walk through Items on the Website with the view Excluded by a Rule or Category. That shows what these rules took away without anyone having said so on the item itself, and so also what a rule took too much of.

When a rule does not do what you expect