In this tutorial, you learn how to use Rule Designer to create a rule-based application, and Rule Execution Server to execute the rules.
This tutorial involves the imaginary web-based application of an online lender. The application is called Miniloan. The Miniloan application aims at deciding whether a customer is eligible for a loan according to several criteria. The criteria include the amount of the loan, the yearly income of the borrower, and the duration of the loan.
The rules development and authoring environment is provided by Rule Designer. The rules execution environment is provided by Rule Execution Server.
The following figure shows the workflow and interactions between the modules.
Prerequisites
A knowledge of Eclipse workspaces, perspectives, and views is helpful. If you are not familiar with Eclipse, go through the short Eclipse Hello World cheat sheet.
To perform this tutorial make sure that you installed the required products:
- Decision Server Rules: contains both Rule Designer and Rule Execution Server.
- Decision Center (optional): only required if you want to perform Task 8: Publishing to Decision Center.
- A supported version of Microsoft Excel to perform Task 4: Testing rules.
- 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.
Audience
This tutorial is aimed at developers, architects, and policy managers.
Learning objectives
In this tutorial, you learn how to:
- Design a rule project.
- Orchestrate the rules and define a flow of execution.
- Write business rules, and then test and debug the rules.
- Deploy the rules to the execution environment.
- Monitor and audit the rules.
- Publish the rule project to the web-based business environment.
Time required
This tutorial takes between 3 and 4 hours to complete.