Learn how to create and manage business rules in the Decision Center Enterprise console and Rule Solutions for Office.
The getting started tutorial helps you to take your first steps with the Decision Center Enterprise console. It includes detailed instructions to create and manage decisions in a business environment.
The scenario of the getting started tutorial is based on the fictitious web-based application of an online lender. The application is called Miniloan. The Miniloan application aims at defining whether a customer is eligible for a loan according to several criteria such as the amount of the loan, the yearly income of the borrower, and the duration of the loan.
The project provided in this tutorial is only available in English (United States).
Prerequisites
- Decision Center. If you want to perform Task 8: Authoring in Rule Solutions for Office which is optional, you must also install Rule Solutions for Office.
- Decision Server: to perform Tasks 5 to 7.
- A supported version of Microsoft Excel to perform Task 5: Validating, Task 6: Creating a simulation, and Task 8: Authoring in Rule Solutions for Office.
- A supported browser version.
- By using the launchpad Sample Server installation. For more information, see Installing the product and the Sample Server.
- By using the default set of features installed with Installation Manager. For more information, see Installing using Installation Manager.
To check that the required products, getting started projects, and the sample server have been installed, see Checking your installation.
For more information about the required products and their modules, and how to install them, see Installing Operational Decision Manager.
In this tutorial, when a URL contains the <PORT> placeholder, you must replace <PORT> with the port number. The default port number for WebSphere® Application Server is 9080 but it can be different depending on your installation.
A was.properties file is created when you start the server for the first time. To know the port number to use, open <WAS_InstallDir>/profiles/ODMSample<version>/data/was.properties, and check the value of the server.port property.
Audience
This tutorial is aimed at business users (rule authors, policy managers, business analysts).
Learning objectives
In Decision Center, you explore the rules in a project, and you check the execution flow. Then, you create action rules and decision tables. You manage changes using queries, you compare different versions of your rules, and create custom views to display only the artifacts that you are interested in.
With Rule Solutions for Office, you can edit rules in Microsoft Office documents. You use the editors integrated with Microsoft Word or Excel to edit business rules, ruleflows, and decision tables with a natural language syntax.
The following figure shows the workflow and the interaction between Decision Center, Rule Execution Server, and Rule Solutions for Office.
To perform this tutorial, you must first start the sample server and sign in to Decision Center.
- Start the sample server and sign in to Decision Center.
- Explore the artifacts already available in the miniloan-rules project.
- Modify existing rules and write a new rule in Decision Center.
- Create a smart folder, and compare two versions of a decision table.
- Create a test suite and a simulation that contains scenarios to run tests on the rules.
- Deploy the rules to the execution environment.
- (Optional) Update a decision table in Excel using Rule Solutions for Office.
Time required
This tutorial should take approximately 3 hours to complete.