Info Types are Norce Commerce's solution for extendability, allowing you to add custom fields to enhance your product data beyond the standard schema. These additional fields provide flexibility to capture specific business information that your warehouse management system or pricing strategy requires.
Info Types enable you to extend two critical areas of product management:
- Product On-Hand Records: Add custom fields to stock information for specific warehouses
- Product Price Records: Add custom fields to pricing information for specific price lists
This extensibility allows you to integrate additional data from external systems and support complex business logic requirements.
Product on-hand info types extend the information available when sending stock data through integration to a product on a specific warehouse.
- Warehouse Details: Store shelf numbers, aisle locations, or storage conditions
- Availability Calculations: Include factors that affect stock availability beyond simple quantity
- Quality Information: Track quality grades, inspection dates, or certification status
- Batch Information: Track batch numbers, expiration dates, or lot codes
When your warehouse management system sends stock updates, these custom fields allow you to:
- Maintain detailed inventory tracking
- Support complex availability calculations
- Provide enhanced information for custom fulfillment processes
- Enable specialized warehouse operations
Product price info types extend the information available for each product on specific price lists, though this is less commonly used than on-hand info types.
- Comparative Pricing: Store comparison price, included fees or taxes amounts
- Unit Pricing: Include price per kilogram, price per unit for bulk sales
- Presentation Data: Store formatting information or special pricing notes
These custom price fields enable:
- Enhanced price presentation on the front-end
- Complex pricing strategies and calculations
- Integration with external pricing systems
- Detailed pricing analytics and reporting
Both Product On-Hand and Product Price info types use the same management interface and functionality.
- Navigate to the appropriate tab (Product On-Hand or Product Price)
- Click "New" to create a new info type
- Set required fields:
- Name: Display name for the info type (language-specific)
- Code: Unique identifier (language-independent)
- Add description (optional): Language-specific explanation of the field's purpose
- Name: Language-specific display name that appears in the admin interface
- Code: Unique identifier used by APIs and integrations (must be unique across all info types)
- Description: Language-specific text explaining the purpose and usage of the info type
Info types support multilingual configurations:
- Names and descriptions can be translated to different languages
- Codes remain consistent across all languages
- Use language flags in the interface to manage translations
To remove an info type:
- Click the "X" button to the right of the info type in the list
- Confirm the action when prompted
- The info type becomes inactive rather than deleted
When an info type is inactivated:
- It no longer appears in active lists
- It's not provided through APIs
- Existing data is preserved and remains in the system
- The info type can be reactivated if needed
Important: Inactivating an info type doesn't delete existing data. All previously stored information remains intact, allowing you to recover from accidental inactivation.
Inactive info types can be restored if needed:
- Click Show inactive
- Click on the X for reactivation
- Update the code
- All historical data remains available
- The info type returns to active API responses
Info types can be arranged in a custom order:
- Drag and drop info types in the list to reorder them
- Save the changes to persist the new sort order
- This order affects how fields appear in interfaces and reports
- Group related info types together in the sort order
- Place frequently used info types at the top of the list
- Use consistent naming conventions for easy identification
- Document the purpose of each info type in the description field