Decision Center basics

Find out about rule projects and their basic components: smart folders, versioning, branching, baselines, and the different types of project elements that you can use in Decision Center.

Rule projects
A rule project corresponds to a specific organization of rules and other project elements.
Branches
Branches facilitate work done on parallel releases of a project.
Smart folders
You use smart folders to specify which elements you want to access in a given rule project, and how they are displayed.
Folders
Folders in Decision Center help you organize your project elements.
Versioning
Decision Center creates archived versions of elements contained in your projects each time you modify them.
Baselines
Baselines capture the state of a project or branch at a specific moment in time.
Recycle bin
The recycle bin contains project elements that have been deleted from the current state of a branch.
Action rules
You can express a business policy in one or more action rules.
Overview: Decision tables
A decision table expresses sets of similar conditions and actions in a table, and helps identify overlaps and gaps in rules.
Decision trees
In a decision tree, conditions are depicted as nodes, values are represented by branch lines, and actions are displayed in boxes at the ends of branches.
RuleDocs
RuleDocs are Microsoft Office documents that contain your rules, decision tables, and ruleflows.
Testing and simulation
Decision Center provides testing and simulation capabilities that you can run against your rules.
Templates
A template is a partially written action rule or decision table that is used as a starting point to create multiple rules or decision tables with similar content and structure. In addition, by defining it as such in the template, parts of rules created from a template can be frozen so that they cannot be edited.
Project element properties
A property provides additional information about a project element.
Ruleflows
Ruleflows are a way of controlling rule execution. They are made of linked tasks that contain the instructions for which rules to execute and in what order. The links between the tasks are called transitions.
Rule verification
You can perform different levels of verification on your rules before you deploy them to the rule-based computer applications on which they act.
Variable sets
Variable sets contain variables that you can use across the different elements of a rule project. You can also use these variables to pass data between tasks in a ruleflow.
Functions
A function is a procedural item written in IRL. It is designed to share procedure code between the elements of a ruleset. A function is composed of a header and a statement part.
Technical rules
Technical rules are written using the ILOG Rule Language (IRL). IRL is a Java-like rule language that can be executed directly by the rule engine.

Parent topic: Managing business rules