Overview of Business Rule Beans

Business Rule Beans are used to create and modify rules that keep pace with complex business practices. This enables your application's core behavior and user interface objects to remain intact and untouched, even as business practices change.

The Business Rule Beans (BRBeans) framework enables you to organize rules in folders. Folders provide a structure similar to the file system on your computer's hard drive. For example:

In the BRBeans framework, each business rule is represented by an entity bean that persistently stores information related to that rule. Each business rule is assigned an appropriate rule name and stored in an appropriate rule folder (See Rule folders for more information).

When naming rules and folders, adhere to the Java package naming convention. That is, name rules and folders based on the domain name of the organization for which the rules are developed. For example, ACME's isSeniorCitizen rule's fully qualified rule name ("full rule name"), might be com/acme/ageRules/isSeniorCitizen. In this example, the com/acme path is used by all of the rules developed by ACME and the ageRules folder is used to separate "age" rules from rules of other kinds. The root folder has no name; therefore, fully qualified path names never start with a forward slash ('/').

A fully qualified rule name consists of the following:

This fully qualified rule name is used by a trigger point to identify the rule to trigger. Trigger points are small pieces of code that interface with the Business Rule Beans trigger point framework to run business rules during application execution. See Placing a trigger point for more information.

By default, trigger points can only trigger rules that are currently in effect based on the current date and time when the trigger point is called. A business rule has a start date and an end date (see Rule attributes for more information) that together define the interval during which the rule is in effect (see Rule states for more information). This behavior can be overridden by specifying a date on the trigger point. This date is referred to as the "As Of Date". If no start date is specified, the rule is not valid and cannot be found by trigger points. Conversely, if no end date is specified, the rule never expires. Dates and times with a precision of one second can be assigned using the "Rule Management Application".

When there is more than one rule with the same fully qualified name, all of the rules with that name that are currently in effect are triggered and the results are combined using the combining strategy specified on the trigger point. See the CombiningStrategy method for more information.


Related concepts
Externalized business rules
Types of business rules
Rule folders
Rule attributes
Rule states
Rule results
Dependent rules
BRBeans run-time environment
BRBeans run-time behavior
BRBeans run-time exception handling
Rule implementors
Trigger point framework
Trigger points
As Of Date
Predefined strategy objects
CombiningStrategy method
Customized strategy objects
Customized rule implementors
Database considerations for BRBeans
Rule Management Application
BRBeans performance enhancements
Related tasks
Using Business Rule Beans
Placing a trigger point in the application code
Related reference
Advantages of externalizing business rules
Rule management command
Rule importer command
Rule exporter command
BRBeans properties file
Rule management APIs



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