Overview of the Operational Decision Manager stage in DataStage

Use the Operational Decision Manager (ODM) stage to invoke complex business rules within the context of a job.

The stage provides DataStage® parallel jobs with access to the ODM engine. The ODM engine can be used to perform complex data transformations on the records in the job.

If the connector is configured to access ODM in core engine mode, it adds rulesets as assets in Cloud Pak for Data.

The ODM stage consists of a design time component and a runtime component.

The design time component consists of the stage editor that collects inputs from the user. It also consists of the configuration wizard that is used to configure the stage properties and link schema definitions of the connector based on the parameter definitions of the specified ruleset.

The runtime component of the connector is responsible for invoking the rulesets within the context of the DataStage job. The ODM stage accepts input data in the form of Java™ objects and the output data that is returned by the ODM stage also consists of Java objects. The basic function of the runtime component is to read the input DataStage records that are sent by the upstream stage and convert them into Java objects. It then invokes the ruleset by using the instantiated Java objects and converts the Java objects that are returned by the ruleset back into DataStage records. These records are then sent to the downstream stage. Therefore, the ODM stage can operate only in the request or reply mode, which further means that it must be positioned in the job as a midstream stage and not the first or the last stage. It is similar, for example, to the use of the Transformer stage.