Bill of material - cost update

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I'm working on a Product BOM (bill of material) and I'm stucked. This is my class diagram:
•A Component has ComponentItems. A ComponentItem has a Component and a quantity. Example: Component ABC has 3 Component C1 and 2 Component C2.
•A Product has ComponentItems and ProductItems (similar to ComponentItems but for Products).

Each Component has a unit cost so a ComponentItem has a total cost. And a Component composed by ComponentItems has a total cost too (sum of ComponentItems cost).

This structure lets me create any Product/Component hierarchy. I'm validating loops in insert/update of products and components.

I want to have each cost updated in database, I don't want to calculate cost using objects every time I have to use a Product/Component. I mean, if I update the unit cost of Component ABC, his parent component cost should be updated and so on --> the update is propagated in the hierarchy.

What's the best way to implement this? I was thinking of a tree representation. When a component is updated, I retrieve all related components/products and build a tree. Then I have to update first level parents of the component and do the same with parents of this parents.

This wasn't easy to explain, I hope it's clear enough.

Thanks in advance.

Posted 26-Jul-11 1:48am

fgoldenstein

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BobJanova · Answer 1 · 2011-07-26T02:19:00

Solution 1

First question: how complex are your components? Recalculating the price each time may not be a problem, and means that you have no issues with caching and making sure updates work.

What you essentially want for rebuilding the prices is a reverse tree: starting from the component that you changed the price on, look up all its ancestors and update their prices. Pseudocode:

void UpdatePrice(Component target, decimal newPrice){
 target.Price = newPrice;
 List<Component> parents = select from components where componentWithUpdatedPrice in Children;
 foreach(Component p in parents){
  UpdatePrice(p, p.RecalculatePrice());
 }
}

You can probably write that query as a bona fide LINQ query but I forget the syntax. I don't see any way to avoid recursion as it's tree walking. If your system permits circular references then you also need to leave yourself a 'passing note' so you don't get into an infinite loop.

Posted 26-Jul-11 2:19am

BobJanova

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fgoldenstein 26-Jul-11 9:44am

Thanks for your answer!

Recalculating cost and price:
I thinks recalculating the cost is an issue because of performance problems. Imagine a producto composed by many products and components. Each children (product or component) composed by many products and components and so on. When you have to calculate cost of a product, it can get really messy. And price, sometimes, depends on cost (price can be fixed or variable).
Also, I prefer to have my DB with summarized values so I can create queries faster.

UpdatePrice method:
Your implementation is OK but I'm afraid of a situation. Take a look at this example:

A------- B
| | | | |
D E E F G

A = 2B + 5D + 2E
B = E + 5F + 8G

When E changes its cost, you have to get its parents, A and B in this case. A gets updated and the B is updated to. A has no parents but B has A as its parent. So you have to update A again.
Maybe this sample is short but this can get very huge.

Thanks again for your help.

fgoldenstein 26-Jul-11 9:46am

I deleted the "solution" I wrote because it was a comment, as BobJanova said. This is his comment, which was deleted after I deleted the solution:

"First thing, you should respond to a solution by using 'Add Comment', not posting a new solution.

If it is not possible for references to be circular, you can solve this by pre-walking and whenever you trip over one of these, switch the order of the parents." BobJanova