Migrating from Business Central to IBM BAMOE Developer Tools

Business Central is the previous-generation web-based platform for authoring business automation assets such as data objects, rules, processes, cases and planning entities. It includes capabilities for monitoring, administration, and management of business automation assets. With the release of both IBM BAMOE Developer Tools and IBM BAMOE Canvas, most of the asset management capabilities were replaced or a different approach was taken. This section describes the migration of business assets created in Business Central so that developers can maintain them by using BAMOE Developer Tools, BAMOE Canvas or both.

The following tools are required to migrate from Business Central to BAMOE Developer Tools. It is assumed that you have a current version of Business Central running to export certain types of assets to their supported form in BAMOE:

The following table focuses on business automation assets no longer supported in the new tools but available in Business Central. The table indicates how to manage assets in the absence of Business Central.

Although all the guided editors are deprecated in IBM BAMOE version 9.1.x, it is possible to convert certain guided assets to their non-guided and supported forms. The following table indicates the mapping from guided to non-guided form:

It is important to be aware that all guided assets are Drools Rule Language (.drl) files under the covers. In most situations, a guided asset can be refactored into a non-guided asset by copying the source from the source tab in Business Central into a file with the file extension .drl. With that in mind, here is an example of how to accomplish this, using a Guided Rule as an example:

Examples

As you can see, this is the default tab (Model) in Business Central’s guided rule editor. If you navigate to the Source tab, you can see that the guided rule is an editor view on top of a standard technical rule written using Drools Rule Language (DLR), as in the following example:

To turn this rule into a non-guided form so that it can be modified by BAMOE Developer Tools, follow these steps:

At this point you are free to modify the new technical rule to your liking, such as updating to use rule units, using OOPATH syntax vs mvel, etc.

Guided Decision Tables are a wizard-led alternative to uploaded decision table spreadsheets for defining business rules in a tabular format. With guided decision tables, you are led by a UI-based wizard in Business Central that helps you define rule attributes, metadata, conditions, and actions based on specified data objects in your project. After you create the guided decision tables, the rules you defined are compiled into Drools Rule Language (DRL) rules as with all other rule assets.

Since the Guided Decision Table editor in Business Central is deprecated, users will need to export guided decision tables to Excel format. Here is an example of how to do this using a Guided Decision Table as an example:

Examples

In order to turn this decision table into a non-guided form so that it can be modified by BAMOE Developer Tools, follow these steps:

As you can see in the diagram, this is the default tab (Model) in Business Central’s guided decision table editor. If you navigate over to the Source tab, you will quickly see that the guided decision table is simply an editor view on top of a standard technical rule written using Drools Rule Language (DLR), as in the following example:

At this point, you can choose to either take the same approach as with guided rules or to export the table to Excel format simply by clicking a button (Convert to XLS), as in the following example:

After the table is converted to XLS format, the new file is added to the Business Central Project Explorer view.

Select the converted file and choose one of the Download buttons in Business Central, which downloads the converted spreadsheet file to your local machine. You can add this file to the src/main/resources folder of your Maven project.