Before you start

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

In this tutorial, you create a web-based application for a fictitious online lender. The web-based application is called Miniloan. It determines whether a customer is eligible for a loan according to specific criteria. The criteria include the amount of the loan, the annual income of the borrower, and the duration of the loan.

When you create Miniloan, you learn how to develop a rule-based application in Rule Designer, and how to run and monitor rules in Rule Execution Server.

Rule Designer and Rule Execution Server are two components in Decision Server Rules. Rule Designer is the environment for developing and authoring rules, and Rule Execution Server is the environment for running and monitoring rules.

Diagram shows Rule Designer and Rule Execution Server in Decision Server Rules.

To make Miniloan, you follow the typical rule development workflow. You start from a version of the application that is hardcoded in Java™, and then you replace the hardcoded logic with business rules. By doing so, you discover the steps that are required to develop, deploy, and maintain a rule-based application.

The following diagram shows the rule development workflow from design to publication.

Diagram shows the tasks and interactions of product modules.

For more information about a particular step, see the summary for a list of related information and tutorials.

Important: You must open Rule Designer in American English. The rule project that contains the rules to import in this tutorial is only provided in American English (en_US).

Learning objectives

You do the following tasks:
  • Design a rule project
  • Orchestrate® rule tasks
  • Write business rules
  • Test and debug rules
  • Deploy rules to a runtime environment
  • Monitor and audit rules
  • Publish a rule project to a development environment for business users

Time required

This tutorial should take approximately 2-3 hours to finish. If you explore other concepts related to this tutorial, it could take longer to complete.

Audience

This tutorial is intended for developers and product architects.

Prerequisites

Before you start the tutorial, ensure that your workstation meets the following requirements:
  • Review the product overview to understand the main goals of the product, some of its modules, and rule-oriented terminology.
  • A knowledge of Java is helpful.
  • A knowledge of the Eclipse workspaces, perspectives, and views is helpful. If you are not familiar with Eclipse, you can go through the short Eclipse Hello World cheat sheet.

Install the required components:

  • Decision Server Rules: Contains Rule Designer and Rule Execution Server.
  • Decision Center: Required only if you want to do Task 7: Publishing to Decision Center.
  • Sample server: Runs web-based components locally. Installation Manager installs the server by default.

Ensure that the required products, getting started projects, and the sample server are installed (see Checking your installation).

For more information about the required products and their modules, see Installing Operational Decision Manager.

Best practices

This tutorial includes the following best practices for working with business rules:

  • Use an empty workspace for each project when possible. It can prevent projects from referencing rule artifacts in other projects. Example...
  • Use the Rule Project Map to guide you through the process for creating a decision service. Example...
  • Organize your rules into packages that contain related rules. Example...
  • Use the rule completion feature, or if you know the rule syntax, type in rules directly. Example...