Before you start

Prepare for the tutorial by reading its description, and checking the audience and prerequisites.

This tutorial shows you how to group complex decisions that involve several rule projects into a decision service. Using a decision service that contains multiple projects has the following advantages:
  • All the rule projects that are contained in the decision service are managed as a whole, across both the IT and the business environments. Each release, change activity, or branch in Decision Center includes all the decision service projects.
  • A decision service has well-defined interfaces and rulesets by means of decision operations. A decision operation includes all the settings that are needed to produce a ruleset: input and output parameters, main ruleflow, and any rule extraction.
  • Deployment is made simpler by the use of deployment configurations, which define what to assemble in a RuleApp and where to deploy it. A deployment configuration can refer to one or more decision operations. Because a deployment configuration is an artifact, it can be synchronized between Rule Designer and Decision Center.
In this tutorial, the decision service uses business rules from different rule projects to validate information from a borrower and determine whether the borrower is eligible for a loan. Then, the decision service determines the borrower's monthly repayment and insurance on the loan. In the tutorial, you assemble the decision service and deploy.
Note: In this tutorial, you use your file system as the target server instead of Rule Execution Server for simplicity. Feel free to try the deployment to your target server.

Learning objectives

You do the following tasks:
  • Create the main rule project for a decision service that includes multiple projects.
  • Create a decision operation.
  • Create a run configuration for a decision operation.
  • Create a deployment configuration for the decision service.

Time required

This tutorial should take approximately 30 minutes to finish. If you explore other concepts related to this tutorial, it could take longer to complete.

Audience

This tutorial is for business analysts and developers who want to use decision services to assemble and deploy rules. It assumes that you are familiar with the Eclipse environment.Who is the intended audience for this tutorial?

Prerequisites

The files for this tutorial are contained in the following directories:
  • <InstallDir>/studio/tutorials/decisionservice/start: This directory contains several rule projects as a starting point from which you build a decision service.
  • <InstallDir>/studio/tutorials/decisionservice/answer: This directory contains the files that are required to run and deploy the decision service.

Best practices

This tutorial includes the following best practices for creating a decision service:
  • Create the main rule project from the Decision Service Map. Example...
  • Use queries to specify a subset of rules in a decision operation. Example...