Hi all,

Another old one that is really a requirements question: OFBIZ-1887, about
ordering configurable products when a store requires inventory.
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-1887

A configurable product like the demo PC001 (type AGGREGATED) holds no stock
of its own - it is assembled from the components you choose. Today the
availability check only knows how to do this for marketing packages, where
it works out availability from the components. Configurable products fall
through to the normal check, which looks at the parent product's own stock
- zero - and, when the store has requireInventory = Y, blocks the order
even though the components are in stock. With the demo default of
requireInventory = N it is hidden, because everything just backorders.

So we have two kinds of "assembled from components" product - marketing
packages and configurable products - and only marketing packages have
component-aware availability. Before fixing anything I would like to agree
on the intended behavior:

- Should a configurable product's availability be worked out from the
components in the chosen configuration, the same way marketing packages are
handled?
- Or should configurable products simply pass the availability check and
rely on the components being checked at fulfillment?
- And how should requireInventory = Y behave for these - block, backorder,
or something in between?

There is also a practical wrinkle: the availability check only receives the
productId, not the chosen configuration, so it cannot currently see which
components to check.

This is closely related to OFBIZ-1411 (marketing packages) - both come down
to the same question of how availability should work for products assembled
from components. It would be good to settle the intended behavior once for
both. What do people think?

Thanks and Regards
Anil Patel
CEO
HotWax Systems
http://www.hotwaxsystems.com

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