Managing rules

Before you begin

In Business Rule Beans (BRBeans), rule management involves making changes to the set of business rules used by applications. This can include any of the following activities:

There are two different interfaces that can be used for rule management:

Rule Management Application
An external user interface that allows users to manage rules interactively. It provides a general purpose interface for managing rules where no assumptions are made about the content or implementation of the rules. For information on how to use the Rule Management Application, see Starting the Rule Management Application.
Rule management APIs
A programmatic interface that can be used by programmers to manage rules or to customize an external user interface. For more information on Rule management APIs, see the com.ibm.websphere.brb.mgmt package.

Why and when to perform this task

Rules can be managed in any way that makes sense for your application, but the BRBeans framework was designed with the following administrative paradigm in mind:

Steps for this task

  1. Understand the desired change in business behavior.
  2. Inspect the application documentation (in particular information that indicates where trigger points are located) to understand where the changes need to be made in the system.
  3. Inspect the corresponding set of existing business rules using the Rule Management Application (or your own custom management application, if you have one) to understand which rules need to change.
  4. Use the Rule Management Application, on a test system, to create one or more new rules that implement the required new behavior. Give these rules the correct name so that they are triggered by the appropriate trigger point. Also, make sure that these new rules are currently in effect.
  5. Withdraw (by setting the end date of the rule), on the test system, all of the rules that are to be superseded.
  6. Test the application to ensure that it behaves as expected.
  7. Export the new rules using the Rule Exporter on the test system. Schedule the rules to become effective at the correct point in time.
  8. Export the rules to be superseded using the Rule Exporter on the test system. Set them to expire when the new rules come into effect.
  9. Import the new rules using the Rule Importer on the production system. This creates the new rules and schedules them to become effective at the date you specified when you exported them.
  10. Import the rules to be superseded using the Rule Importer on the production system. This puts the new end date into the existing rules on the production system and sets them to expire on the specified date.

What to do next

For more information on the overall topic of Externalizing business rules, see Using Business Rule Beans

Related concepts
Rule Management Application
Related tasks
Using Business Rule Beans
Implementing business rules
Related reference
Rule management APIs



Searchable topic ID:   tbrb_manageru
Last updated: Jun 21, 2007 8:07:48 PM CDT    WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation, Version 5.0.2
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