Branches and releases in synchronization

Synchronization between Rule Designer and Decision Center is done one branch at a time, whether you use regular branches or the release and change activity branches in a decision service.

In Rule Designer, you can have only one branch in your workspace at any given time. To synchronize with the different branches in use in Decision Center, connect, disconnect, and reconnect with each branch individually. When you disconnect, keep the connection entries for that branch. These entries are stored as part of the branch, allowing you to reconnect with that branch without introducing conflicts.

Releases and change activities

The first publishing of a decision service creates an initial, closed release in Decision Center. Subsequent changes to the decision service in Decision Center take place in releases that are created from this initial release. In the Business console, changes to a release can only be done in change activities. Releases and change activities are branches of the decision service.

Note: If you do not want to use the decision governance framework with your decision services, you have the choice of publishing to a branch called main.

After the initial publishing you generally publish changes to open change activities, and not directly to the release branch or to a closed changed activity. Of course you can update changes done in any branch in Decision Center back to your Rule Designer workspace so that all versions are synchronized.

Note: You can publish changes to a release branch if you connect with administrator rights. This privilege is offered for flexibility, but use it with restraint, because it circumvents the governance framework. Synchronizing to a release is the only way dependencies of a decision service can be changed.

You can also publish changes to a release branch if you are owner of the release, or owner of an activity within this release. To be able to publish, you must set the configuration parameters Allow release owner to publish in their release, and Allow activity owner to publish in parent release to true in the Installation Settings Wizard of the Enterprise console. For more information about how to access this wizard, see Overview: Installation Settings Wizard.

A decision service is designed for several rule projects to be grouped as one entity under a main project. The decision service is assigned the name of the main project. All other projects contained in the decision service contain a direct or indirect dependency to the main project. When you publish from the main project, all dependent projects are also published to Decision Center.

If you need to add a project to the decision service, consider this as a redesign of the decision service. Consequently, you can only add a project to an open release, and not to a change activity. To publish a new project to the decision service, add the project in Rule Designer and set its dependency to the main project. Then connect to the release and publish the project. After the publish is completed, synchronize the decision service and publish the changes relating to the new dependencies.