Before you start
This tutorial shows how to create decision tables for a reservation application that is used by a car rental company. You use decision tables because the business rules contain similar actions and conditions. You learn how to create and use decision tables, format data display, and import data from an Excel spreadsheet into a decision table.
A car rental company has a car 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.
Learning objectives
This tutorial demonstrates a number of decision table tasks:
- How to create and edit decision tables.
- How to copy and paste data from Excel into decision tables.
- How to recognize overlapping data.
- How to change the formatting of decision table data.
Time required
This tutorial takes about one hour to complete.
Directory structure
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.
What you need to know
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.