Overview
The Business Rules Server allows all the applications within a financial institution’s system to have a single decision point to which to call. The Business Rules Server is not restricted to any particular application or processing environment. It enables a customer to design unique data tables and business rules which can be called from any application within the system. This product provides support for requests from multiple input channels across a financial institution’s system. These channels include existing check applications, ATMs, corporate capture, and tellers.
The Business Rules Server is a decision-maker which uses customer-defined tables and customer-defined business rules to build a response to the calling application. An answer is returned for every question asked of the Business Rules Server, all dependent on how the system is programmed to work. The calling application uses the Business Rules Server response to perform a particular action.
- Provides a single point of data management and control across the Business Rules environment for tables, user exits, workflows, nodes, and other configuration data.
- Provides integrity and validation checking for customer data:
- Any customer configuration data that is XML-based is checked against the appropriate Business Rules Server schema.
- The customer table data is validated using the associated XML table descriptor. This checking verifies the transmission contents by checking attributes such as: the transmission size is a multiple of the record length; the keys are unique and in ascending order.
- The attributes of each customer data transmission sent to Business Rules Server are passed to a customer user exit, along with attribute information from previous versions of the transmission. Customers may then perform some content checking against the transmission, for example, is the record count within the expected range.
- Duplicate record checking extends only to the record key. Each customer table record must have a unique key, and the keys must be in ascending order.
- The client application determines how the Business Rules Server processing flow is used. The flow determination may consist of data, such as site identification, sort types, and payment origination (check, ATM). The processing flow may be overridden by customer code running on the Business Rules Server.
Customer defined tables are deployed to the Business Rules Server instances by the Business Rules Manager. The Business Rules Manager is a separately run component that receives notifications from the Business Rules engine to build and distribute database tables to selected Business Rules Server instances. Users activate a release and the Business Rules Manager retrieves table data through database views, builds and validates the tables, and issues a distribution message to the waiting Business Rules Server instances using WebSphere® MQ.
The Business Rules Manager supports another distribution method by which it monitors a landing zone that can be fed from outside utilities. Tables delivered by this method can be validated and distributed by WebSphere MQ notification.