The Business Rules Engine is a powerful rule management system built into Appway's architecture. It helps business people define and manage business rules, putting application and process control back into their hands.
Overview
The Appway Business Rules Engine is based on four fundamental premises which guide our product development:
Business rules are a corporate asset.
Policy-based business rules must be automated.
The hardest part about automating business rules is getting them right.
Industry professionals know their business rules best and should be empowered to manage them.
All business rules are managed and created by business people through an easy-to-use interface. The graphic tool set or one of several assistants designed specifically for managers and business analysts guide the user through the process of creating rules.
From your Browser
The 100% web-based interface makes it possible for authorized business analysts to access all rules anywhere, anytime. The Business Rules Engine runs as a service component within the Appway software architecture.
Create, Organize, Find
The rules manager provides an easily understandable overview of the various rules and rule sets. The built-in filter function lets analysts filter large rule sets in order to find specific rules quickly.
Decouple and Reuse
The Business Rules Engine separates rule and event management from individual business processes. This means that business rules can be applied across applications, reducing redundancies.
Rules Sets
To manage the complexity of day-to-day business, business rules can be added to different sets. Selecting rules thus becomes more flexible when working on runtime data. Sets also help to maintain the rules in a meaningful context.
Efficient Rule Execution
The Appway rule engine operates on the same data as workflows, screenflows and all other Appway business objects. There is no duplicated information and memory waste when executing rules.
Visual Editing
The rule designer allows users to assemble rules in a visual way. Drag & drop means that rules can be clicked together quickly and easily.
Conditions and Actions
Appway uses condition-action (CA) business rules. A CA business rule consists of a condition part (the antecedent) and an action part (the consequent). Appway's rule engine supports forward-chaining (procedural logic), which is very efficient at handling CA rules.
An action can be used to do anything, such as producing PDF output or screens, or show and hide screen sections. Rules can help construct complex output statements such as full addresses in a PDF or a dynamic document. In a workflow, rules can be used to select a participant to forward a work item to, or to calculate the set of PDF documents to generate for a certain business activity such as opening a new customer account.
Script actions make many more interesting features possible: sending emails or text messages, communicating with your VoIP gateway, starting a new workflow instance, importing or exporting runtime data, etc.
In addition to business rules, Appway supports inline rules in the form of boolean expressions. These are used to evaluate values controlling the display logic, process flow or gateway rules.
