Why synchronize?

As rules can be stored and maintained in two repositories in parallel, you must synchronize these repositories from time to time to keep them consistent.

At the beginning of a decision rule development project, developers create rules by using the Eclipse-based Rule Designer application, and store them in a source control system (SCS) to share files, handle versions, and resolve potential conflicts that can arise when several users are committing changes to the same repository .

At a later point in time, developers must push rule projects or decision services developed in Rule Designer to the Decision Center environment to make them available to business users (rule authors and policy managers). In Decision Center, rule projects or decision services are stored in a database. Decision Center handles concurrent accesses to the database and versioning.

When a rule project or decision service is both maintained in Rule Designer and Decision Center, it is necessary to synchronize them periodically to bring them at the same level. Synchronization is a process that can be done either manually or automatically with ant tasks, and is always initiated from Rule Designer.

The following illustration shows how rule projects or decision services are synchronized between Rule Designer and Decision Center.

Diagram shows the synchronization of work between business users and developers.