Business Rules

Business Rule is one of the component of SOA Suite tool. Business rules are statements that describe business policies. It allows a business analyst to change policies with little or no assistance from a programmer. It also enables business to change their key decisions and policies rapidly and flexibly. There is no need to change the deployed application if there is a need to implement certain logic at runtime.

Business Rules can be used in following different ways.

• A decision component can be used within a SOA composite and used directly to run business rules.
• A decision component can be used with the Advanced Routing Rules in Human Workflow.
• A decision component can be used within a SOA composite and wired to a BPEL component.

Business Rules Architecture

As shown below, Composite application interact with Rules Engine on which Business Rules component runs. All business rules stored in rule repository. Rule author is web browser where user can go change the business rules without any code changes.

Let’s briefly introduce the key components which make up a Business Rule. These are:

Facts: Represent the data or business objects that rules are applied to.

Rules: A rule consists of two parts, an IF part which consists of one or more tests to be applied to fact(s), and a THEN part, which lists the actions to be carried out should the test to evaluate to true
Rule Set: As the name implies, it is just a set of one or more related rules that are designed to work together.
Dictionary: A dictionary is the container of all components that make up a business rule; it holds all the facts, rule sets, and rules for a business rule.