Before you start

Prepare for the tutorial by reading its description, and checking the audience and prerequisites.
In this tutorial, you create a decision service that determines whether a borrower is eligible for a loan. The decision service applies rule conditions for the amount of the loan, the annual income of the borrower, and the duration of the loan.

The tutorial shows you how to create and debug the decision service in Rule Designer, deploy it to Rule Execution Server, and publish it to Decision Center. Rule Designer is the editing environment for creating decision services and authoring rules, Rule Execution Server monitors and runs rules, and Decision Center is the cloud environment for collaborative rule authoring, management, and validation.

The following diagram shows the workflow for making a decision service. It goes from design to publication, and shows the users of the different components. The numbers in the diagram correspond to the tasks in the tutorial:

Diagram shows the workflow for making and publishing a decision service.
Extended description of tutorial.

Learning objectives

You do the following tasks:
  • Design a decision service.
  • Orchestrate® rules.
  • Create an action rule.
  • Update a decision table.
  • Test and debug rules.
  • Deploy a decision service to Rule Execution Server.
  • Publish a decision service to Decision Center.
  • Delete a decision service from Decision Center.
The tutorial does not cover collaborative development and the decision governance framework in the Decision Center Business console. To simplify the tutorial, you work in an ungoverned branch of the decision service in the console.

Time required

This tutorial should take approximately 60 minutes to finish. If you explore other concepts related to this tutorial, it could take longer to complete.

Audience

The tutorial introduces you to decision service development. The tutorial is primarily for configuration managers, and rule developers.

Prerequisites

You need the following items to do the tutorial:
  • Cloud portal access: You must be invited to the portal and activate your account.
  • Rule Designer: You must download this component from the portal and install it on your computer (see Preparing to create decision services). The size of the download file is about 800 MB.
  • odm_on_cloud_getting_started_master.zip: Along with Rule Designer, download the sample project from the portal to the same directory, and extract its contents to the directory. It contains the Miniloan Service project and the Miniloan Server web application. The tutorial later refers to the directory as <InstallDir>/miniloanservice-projects. The size of the download file is about 141 KB. You can also download the file from GitHub by using this link: Miniloan Service project and Miniloan Server web application External link opens a new window or tab.
  • Rule Execution Server: You use this component in the portal.
  • Decision Center Business console: You use this component in the portal.

More information

  • The product overview on the main goals of the product, its modules, and rule-oriented terminology (see Overview)
  • A knowledge of Java™
  • A knowledge of the Eclipse workspaces, perspectives, and views

Best practices

This tutorial includes the following best practices for creating a decision service in Rule Designer:
  • Start with an empty workspace when you create a decision service. Example...
  • Follow the Rule Project Map to create a decision service. Example...
  • Begin by defining a sequence in which to run the rules. Example...