Business Rules - Assuring Data Integrity.

BUSINESS RULES

Business rules are the descriptions of the policies and practices of an organization. They enable organizations to automate their policies and practices, to increase consistency and timeliness of their business processing, and they aid in decision-making.

OmniBuilder supports business rules of any complexity. They are defined declaratively and once defined, result in full implementation at the server or the client as specified. No proprietary code has to be written or managed by the developer. OmniBuilder can generate business rules to multiple technologies and multiple architectures ensuring that the investment made in defining business rules is maintained as the application is re-engineered.

Business rules generated by OmniBuilder are already debugged, tested, and optimized for handling large amounts of data. They will be enforced consistently throughout the system. Business rules will be fully described in the system and user documentation which OmniBuilder generates.

In OmniBuilder business rules are declared as part of the business requirements. Managing business rules here makes for more intuitive definition of the rules, guarantees relevance to the business needs, and allows for completeness checks of the requirements. Business rules are defined within broad business functions. They are defined alongside other requirements like Use Cases, activities, strategies, and so on.

Adding a Compensation Business Rule
busines rules

OmniBuilder supports both declared and implicit business rules.

Declared Business Rules

Declared business rules are those which you define specifically to implement your business policies. They are created declaratively using Design Patterns. Validation Business Rules, for example, support an "It MUST hold true that..." and "It must NOT be the case that..." syntax and any number of predicate conditions. Rules can have these characteristics:

Implemented on the server or client
Immediate or deferred enforcement (i.e. the rule does not halt processing but logs the non-compliance as an exception condition )
Many be attached to events such as creation, deletion or update, or to meaningful business events (ex. 'overdue')
Can have exception conditions (ex. "except those employees who are senior management")
Defined in simple English syntax

OmniBuilder implements the business rules as triggers on multiple physical tables or views as necessary, making sure that all participants enforce the rule and its corollary(ies).

Implicit Business Rules

Implicit business rules are implemented as design patterns and manage proper system states for application objects, for example:

Mandatory fields
Uniqueness of the value within the application or scope of the application
Arc (either/or) relationship
Delete behaviours (cascade, restricted, etc.)
Domain constraints
See Product Specifications for more design patterns ordered by component.

Implicit business rules are added declaratively to objects (such as business objects and properties, windows, middle-tier objects, etc.) within OmniBuilder. Then OmniBuilder takes care of the full implementation of the feature.

Debugging Business Rules

Debugging business rules, validating against actual data, and providing appropriate feedback mechanisms for the user are easy to accomplish with OmniBuilder.

The developer can test new rules immediately against existing data in the physical table(s), or in prototyping mode with new data. He can examine the query strategy for correctness while working in a full debug environment. When a rule is violated the data within the transaction is presented to the developer along with the business object list.

The end-user is notified of a broken rule via a text message written in layman's terms, optionally including the bad data. At the time of rule violation a procedure can be offered to the user to immediately correct or further diagnose the problem.

OmniBuilder provides an intensive batch validation mode which checks all declared and implicit business rules against the data in the system. It produces an HTML exception report which includes the broken rules, the data which contravenes the rule and the business objects involved with full drill-down throughout the business model.