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Dynamically Adaptable Business Rules

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Introduction for Demo

1. Start the program:

1) Please click HERE to download the file and unzip it to a local directory
2) To run the system, you need to have Java 1.3 or 1.4 installed in your machine. 
3) Right click the “br.jar” icon, select “open with” in the popup menu, and open the system using a program called “javaw”.
4) If you cannot find the “javaw” in the popup menu, please go to start -> run, and input “cmd”. In the DOS console, run the system using the command “java –jar br.jar”. You should see a window as follows:

5) Please click the “Manage Business Terms” button to create business terms and to create mappings between terms and attributes in the conceptual model. Click the “Manage Business Rules” button to create and edit business rules.

2. Create a business term:

1) After clicking the “Manage Business Terms” button, you will see the “Open business terms” window shown in the following figure. This window lists all existing terms. You can edit a term by selecting it and clicking the “open” button, create a new term by clicking the “new” button, or remove an existing term by selecting it and clicking the “remove” button.

 2) Click the “open” button. The window with the title “Create New Term” appears. This window captures general information about a term including a brief description, the authorizing person and the classification of the term. The following figure displays how the base term “order criticality” is created.

 3) You click the “save” button, the business term is generated and saved in the term dictionary. Now a window that displays all the entities and their associated attributes appears.  An example of creating a mapping between the term “order_cricality” and the attribute “Order.order_type” is shown in the following figure. This window shows all the entities in the conceptual model. When the entity “Order” is selected, the scroll pane with the title of “Attributes” shows all the attributes associated with the entity. By selecting the attribute “order_type” and then clicking the “Add” button, we create a mapping between the business term “order_criticality” and the attribute “Order.order_type”. To remove the mapping, we select “Order.order_type” in the text box with the title “Term Mapping” and click the “Remove” button.

3. Create a business rule:

1) By clicking the “Manage Business Terms” button, you will see the window shown in the following figure. This window lists all existing business rules. You can edit a rule by selecting the term and clicking the “edit” button, create a new rule by clicking the “add” button, or remove an existing rule by selecting the rule and clicking the “remove” button.

2) To create a new business rule, click the “add” button. You will see a window shown in the following figure. In the tabbed pane with the title “Basic”, you can input basic information about a business rule. Then, click the “Rule Template” to create a rule statement. 

3) The rule template guides the user in formulating a business rule. As shown in the following figure, whenever the user wants to insert an “if” or “then” statement, the rule template is overlaid by a window that only allows him/her to form a rule clause by selecting a term defined by data analysts in the business term management subsystem. In our example, the business rule named “small-order-importance” consists of business terms “order-criticality” and “order-size”. Since these business terms have already been mapped to data objects in the enterprise data model, the system automatically displays the attributes associated with the business rule in the textbox with the title “Associated Attributes”.

For more information, please contact us.