A material declaration is a representation of the reporting of
compliance of a manufacturer equivalent part by a supplier.
See
User Preferences for information on
preferences you can set for automatically creating material declarations.
Initially the material declaration represents a request to the supplier
to report. As the supplier submits compliance, the reported part data is stored
with the material declaration for review and approval by a Compliance Engineer.
When the material declaration is formally accepted, the reported part data is
copied to the manufacturer equivalent part to make it effective.
When a manufacturer equivalent part (MEP) is deleted, the material
declaration associated with that MEP also gets deleted. Since a material
declaration can be associated with multiple MEPs, when any one the referenced
MEPs is deleted, the corresponding material declaration will not be deleted
until the last MEP referencing that material declaration is deleted.