Before you start

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

A fictitious car rental company has a rental policy that changes regularly. The company implements the policy with a reservation application that allows agents to carry out the following tasks:
  • Complete car rental agreement forms: At this stage, the rules assess customer eligibility and validate the rental agreement.
  • Quote a price for the reservation: Rules compute the price and select the best promotional discount plan.
  • Assign cars to customers: Rules resolve car assignments when customers come for pickup, and suggest upgrades if there is a shortage of cars.

You create decision tables for the reservation application. You use decision tables because the business rules contain similar actions and conditions.

Important: Rule Designer provides two decision table editors (see Comparing decision table editors). This tutorial is based on the default editor. To do this tutorial with the legacy editor, select 8.11.1 in the Change version menu at the top of the table of contents.

Learning objectives

You do the following tasks:
  • Create and edit decision tables.
  • Copy and paste data from Excel into decision tables.
  • Recognize overlapping data.
  • Change the formatting of decision table data.

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

This tutorial is intended for business analysts and developers who want to learn how to create and edit decision tables in Rule Designer. It assumes that you are familiar with Excel and the Eclipse environment.

Prerequisites

You can find the files for this tutorial in the following directories:
  • <InstallDir>\studio\tutorials\decisiontable
  • <InstallDir>\studio\tutorials\shared

The tutorial directory has the following structure:

  • answer_en_US: Answer directory for this tutorial, which contains a rule project example.
  • shared: Shared directory for all the tutorials and the following project:
    • carrental-xom: A Java™ project that contains an Execution Object Model (XOM). The XOM is the implementation of a business object model (BOM).
  • start_en_US: Start directory for this tutorial, which contains the following items:
    • rules: A rule project that contains a complete vocabulary and a setup for execution (functions and launch configuration). This project references the Java project in the shared directory.
    • COVERAGES.xls: Located in the rules project, COVERAGES.xls is an Excel file that contains data to be copied into a new decision table in this tutorial.

Best practices

This tutorial includes the following best practices for editing decision tables:
  • Define the condition and action columns in a decision table before you add values for the variables. Example...
  • Merge cells that share the same value. Example...
  • Drag a cell to repeat its content in more than one row. Example...