[Enterprise Extensions only]

Rule administration

In BRBeans, rule administration involves making changes to the set of business rules being used by applications. This can include any of the following activities:

There are two different interfaces that can be used for rule administration:

Rules can be administered in any way that makes sense for your application, but the BRBeans framework was designed with the following adminstrative paradigm in mind:

  1. Understand the change in business behavior that is desired.
  2. Inspect the application documentation (in particular information indicating where trigger point are located) to understand where the changes will need to be made in the system.
  3. Inspect the corresponding set of existing business rules using the Rule Management Application (or your own custom management application, if you have one) to understand which rules need to change.
  4. On a test system, use the Rule Management Application to create one or more new rules that implement the required new behavior. Give these rules the correct name so that they will be triggered by the appropriate trigger point. Also make sure that these new rules are currently in effect.
  5. On the test system, withdraw (by setting the end date of the rule) all rules that are to be superseded.
  6. Test the application to ensure it behaves as expected.
  7. Using the Rule Exporter on the test system, export the new rules. Schedule them to become effective at the correct point in time.
  8. Using the Rule Exporter on the test system, export the rules to be superseded. Set them to expire at the point in time at which the new rules come into effect.
  9. Using the Rule Importer on the production system, import the new rules. This will create the new rules and schedule them to become effective at the date specified when they were exported.
  10. Using the Rule Importer on the production system, import the rules to be superseded. This will put the new end date into the existing rules on the production system, thus setting them to expire on the specified date.