As our investigation into products continues, along with the inability to re-parent a product, another action which is apparently impossible (at least according to the second part of this blog article but not the diagram at the top of the article), is reactivating a retired product.
We have attempted to use an on-demand workflow to change the status to Active, Draft and Under Revision but are greeted with an error message saying that a retired product cannot be changed.
In my opinion, a software package should never, ever be able to prevent an administrator from changing the status of a record. My assumption is that the implementation of the retire function is such that allowing a change of status sufficiently breaks the system in a catastrophic way and is therefore, simply wrong.
This post is partially a vent and partially a warning to others:
Never, ever, ever retire a product unless you are so damn sure that you will never under any conceivable circumstance want to re-activate it. For gods sake if you really do retire a product, change the product ID before you do because unless you disable de-duplication, you will never, ever, ever be able to use the product ID again. And yes Microsoft, sometimes product IDs, rightly or wrongly, are re-used.
Please, someone - I really hope we are wrong and that products can be un-retired.
