Developing a rule engine extension

You can develop your own rule engine extensions to customize and extend the default rule engine.

The rule engine uses ODM. A custom ODM adapter solution might be necessary because the available, generic ODM adapter has a number of limitations:
  • The ODM driver used by the adapter might not be compatible with the version of ODM that you have installed.
  • The InfoSphere® MDM Java data model (com.dwl.tcrm.*) does not share the same namespace as the MDM XSD model (com.ibm.mdm.schema). This means that you cannot cast one type to the other when calling the rule engine.
  • If you import the Java object model, instead of the XSD model, into ODM, then there will be conflicts between the various WebSphere class loaders. Each OSGi module in InfoSphere MDM uses its own class loader, as does the ODM XU.

The following procedures enable you to bundle the extension you create and call the rules engine in a straightforward, repeatable way.

Note: Throughout this section, code examples illustrate a sample implementation of a typical rule engine extension project.