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Business Rules & Inheritance

A Business Rule is a search setting you create once and reuse across different Experiences when the conditions match. Instead of setting up the same rule multiple times, it’s applied automatically to subcategories or other Experiences with the same conditions through inheritance.

Watch the video below to see how it works in Playground.

Reading a setting

Every inheritable setting in the Playground is shown as a card. The header holds the setting name, a badge with its state (Inherited, Customized, Excluded, or Defined here) and, under the badge, a line naming where the value comes from, for example "from Fallback". The actions for the setting are listed at the bottom of the card.

To see the whole inheritance chain, hover over or focus the badge. The chain shows:

  • the experience that holds the value
  • the current experience, marked You're here
  • how many experiences below inherit the value and how many have their own

For the meaning of each state, see Experience inheritance.

Changing where a value comes from

  • Customize gives the current experience its own copy of an inherited value, which you can then change.
  • Inherit discards the current experience's own value and uses the inherited one again.
  • Exclude stops the inherited value from being used in the current experience and in the experiences below it. A confirmation names the setting and lists the experiences below that lose it before anything changes.
  • Restore inheritance removes an exclusion.
  • Delete removes a value that is defined only on the current experience.

These changes are saved when you select Update experience, and take effect in search after the next publication.

Copying a value to the parent

Use Copy to parent when a customized value should apply to the parent experience and to the experiences that inherit from it.

  1. On the customized setting, select Copy to parent.
  2. Review the parent experience at the top. It lists every value of the setting. Values that change show the parent's current value struck through, followed by the new value.
  3. Hover over applies to N experiences to see which experiences will change and which have their own value and will not change.
  4. Review the current experience at the bottom. It is marked Moving up and will inherit from the parent.
  5. Select Apply, read the confirmation, and select Copy to followed by the parent's name.

The parent's value is replaced at once, and the current experience goes back to inheriting in the same step, so it keeps the same values and has nothing left to save. Like every other change, the new value takes effect in search after the next publication.

Copy to parent is disabled, with the reason shown on hover, when the values already match the parent or when the parent excludes the setting. It is not offered for pinned products.

Settings that hold several rules

Each parameter, and each bury field-and-value pair, is a setting of its own. Two parameters on the same experience can therefore have different states and come from different experiences, and the actions on one never change the other.