Before you start

Prepare for the tutorial by reading its description, and checking the audience and prerequisites.

In this tutorial, you work on Miniloan Service, a decision service that a fictitious loan company uses to determine whether borrowers are eligible for loans. The decision service processes data that includes loan durations, credit scores, and loan amounts.

You make your changes in the Decision Center Business console, which is a shared rule-editing environment. When you work on changes that might be used in a decision service, you can create a branch that isolates your work. The changes that you make in your branch do not affect the other branches in the decision service until you share them.

To add your changes to another branch, you can use the merge feature in the Business console. It lets you select the branches, changes, and update options, and it provides progress information on your updates.

In this tutorial, you create two branches in a decision service. You change three rules in one of the branches, and merge changes into the other branch. Then, you check the second branch to ensure that it contains your changes.

Learning objectives

You learn how to do the following tasks:
  • Compare branches before merging changes
  • Select changes and update options
  • Merge changes between branches
  • Verify your changes by using a snapshot

The tutorial does not cover collaborative development in the decision governance framework. You work in an ungoverned branch of the decision service, and not in a release.

Time required

This tutorial should take approximately 30 minutes to finish. If you explore other concepts related to this tutorial, it could take longer to complete.

Audience

The tutorial introduces you to merging branches in the Business console. You can use the tutorial as a business user, configuration manager, rule developer, or integrator.

Prerequisites

You work on the Miniloan Service decision service in the sample server. If Miniloan Service is not available in the Business console when you log in, ask your system administrator to publish the decision service to Decision Center. Do the following tasks before you begin:

The decision service and tutorial files are in English.

More information

If you are not familiar with the Business console or the merge function, you can learn more in the following sections:

Best practices

This tutorial includes the following best practices for merging branches:
  • Keep Lock branches before merge selected to prevent other users from making changes to the branches while you merge them. Example...
  • Check the merge results by comparing snapshots. Example...