- First look at JRules 7
- First look at JRules 7.0 – Migration of a project
- First look at JRules 7.0 – Decision Validation Service
- First looks at JRules 7.0 – Rule Solutions for Office
- First look at JRules Scorecard Modeler
Rule Solutions for Office is the newest addition to the JRules family. It allows business users to edit rules in Word (for Action Rules) or Excel (for Decision Tables). Rule Solutions for Office requires MS Office 2007 which is definitely not available in all business environments (companies are sometimes slow to upgrade these suites).
That said, I think the actual product is extremely useful and a lot of companies should be able to use it to make rule editing easier.
The premise here is that from a teamserver rules repository, it is possible to export the contents of the rules to a Word document for regular business rules and to an Excel spreadsheet for decision tables. These Word and Excel documents then allow a user to edit the rules “offline” and then, once they are done, upload the changes back to teamserver.
For exporting the rules from teamserver to the Office documents, it is possible to use queries and some other settings to filter some rules out or to break the documents into pieces by package. Before the actual export takes place, you are able to verify that the results will be as you expect.
This export does not seem to be able to allow a user to save files to his or her drive, but exports to a location that the server has access to (possibly a shared drive). To update the changes in teamserver, those files in the specified location need to be updated. When I think about it, it makes sense because you probably want to control who downloads what and especially who re-uploads what and doing things that way should give control to the Rules Administrator.
In both plug-ins it is possible to have a view of the vocabulary that is available for writing the rules.
Conflict resolution
In my tests, I experimented with making 2 different changes to a rule in the Office plugins as well as the same rules on the team server. When trying to upload the rules back into teamserver, the process actually detects the conflict and indicates that your teamserver rules might be overridden. It then lists the rule in conflict, and allows you to choose between overriding the rule or not. The default is to not override the teamserver rules. (Side note: Internet Explorer 8 does not behave very well as a browser with teamserver, so I switched to Firefox half way through my tests).
Excel Plug-in
The Excel Plug in allows edition of decision tables. I was happy to see that it includes some of the basic validations you would expect from a decision table valuator such as flagging overlaps in rows or checking for gaps. It makes edition of the rules very easy. It is also possible to see the preconditions on the table if any are present as well as viewing the rule statement that the row is equivalent to just to make reviewing a little easier.
It is possible to add condition and action columns in existing decision tables the same as you would be in Rule Studio or teamserver. What I was impressed with as well is that you can also add completely new decision tables by adding a new worksheet in your workbook. Very Cool. Deletion of decision tables is also possible simply by deleting the worksheet.
Word Plug-in
The Word plugin also allows a user to edit the rules, add new rules or delete rules. The editor for the rules is pretty solid, it prompts the user with choices in a behavior that is very similar to the behavior on teamserver.
The final word
Rules Solutions for Office is a set of extremely powerful plug-ins that business users can easily leverage for writing rules off-line. As long as the users has been exposed to rule edition before (in teamserver for example) they should be able to easily figure out what to do within the Word and Excel environment. Training will be required if they have not edited rules before.
In short, very cool amd functional tools for business users.
Tags: Business Rules, jrules