Business Rules Management Uses, Inputs & Results

Use Decisions Rules to:

Automate interactions in a workflow, replacing common manual tasks
Automate batch processing of data
Make forms more interactive – update and validate live data and provide visibility
Add content and relevance to dashboard data, including filtering (for security or relevance), coloring, summarizing, and more

Add security functions in the user and design portal, including role – based access
Hide non-relevant user actions
Be consumed by API from another application, extending the power of Decisions rules to that application
And much more…

Rule Inputs and Results

Rules take in data elements and produce a result.

Sample Inputs:

Data Elements Fed to a Rule Can Be:

Simple values (e.g., text or numbers)
Complex data (e.g., a policy or a medical record)

Sample Results:

Rule Evaluation Can Result In:

True/False, which can trigger an action
Data Values – a simple decision (logical result) or any other data type of value

Example – If a Rule delivers a TRUE, you could automatically send an email, write a value to a database, prompt a user, or automatically kick off other processes and actions.

Tips for Running Rules

Rules need to be called by an application or a workflow in order to run. Applications generally use the rule result to perform additional functionality – there are a number of ways application functionality can access rules.

On Schedule

Run rules on a schedule, looking up the data in a database, FTP server, email inbox, or another mechanism

Via Service Interface

Any rule can be called using a SOAP or REST (XML or JSON) service interface

Each rule has an integration page that shows all of the different service interface options and provides sample data structures and/or code for the integration

On Batches of Data

Feed large batches of data into the rule engine using flows. Decisions can manage flat files (e.g., csv, excel), structured files (e.g., JSON/XML), as well as stored prebuilt data

Via Message Bus

Rules can be triggered to run as a result of a message across an infrastructure, such as RabbitMQ, MSMQ or IBM MQ Series, which are suitable for high performance or high throughput environments