To create a friendly user experience during the configuration process, irrelevant questions should not be asked, and unavailable options should not be offered. For example, there is no need to ask if a car should include a charging cable if the user has selected a petrol engine. Therefore, rules are required to control when parameters and values are shown or hidden.

There is also a need to hide parameters and values in the production environment while preparing options that have not yet been released, see site effectivity for rules.

Parameters and multi-choice values are hidden using inclusion rules

There are two types of rules for hiding parameters: Inclusion rules and Inclusion expression rules. Rather than simply hiding parameters, these rules determine whether a parameter is an active part of the configuration model or entirely excluded. When a parameter is excluded, it is automatically hidden from the user interface. The difference between the two rule types is whether the trigger for including parameters is defined by parameter/value combinations or by a Boolean expression.

Lookup values and multi-choice values are hidden using disallowed combination rules

Lookup values can be hidden by making them disallowed through disallowed combination rules. By default, disallowed values are displayed as disabled, allowing users to click on them to see how to make them selectable.

For disabled values to be completely hidden, you must enable either the Hide if disabled option for the individual lookup value or the Hide values if disabled option for the parent lookup parameter, which affects all its values.

The same behavior applies to hiding multi-choice values, though the setting for hiding multi-choice values is only available at the value level. Furthermore, hiding only occurs when Checked is disallowed, not when Unchecked is disallowed.