IDIOM News
From Business Rules Journal
The IDIOM Decision Suite User Interface
The IDIOM user interface makes extensive use of wizards to guide users in creating rules that accurately reflect business requirements and are free of construction errors. Drag and drop is used widely for its intuitive clarity and its ability to speed up the work of the adept user. Visual cues and colour themes help users ‘find their way’.
For example, one of the rules builder’s first tasks when confronted with a new schema is to identify the various output fields (the places where the results of his/her formulas will be returned) and capture the sequence in which the input values are validated and used to generate the output values. This process flow can become quite sophisticated where there are dependencies between fields and output values that need to be built up by a succession of collaborating steps.
To support this task IDIOM uses a mind-mapping metaphor in which graphical decision hierarchies are developed with increasingly detailed branches. In the following simple example, the leaf nodes in the hierarchy (rounded, blue icons) are decisions, which are executed at runtime in top to bottom order. The elements on the left of the Scope window (square, green icons) are decision groups whose function is to express the process decomposition.
Figure 4: Creating Decisions in the IDIOM Decision Palette
Decision hierarchies show the decomposition of a decision request into the smallest logical units that are useful to the business: that is, single atomic decisions. An atomic decision generates one output value: that is, one value that is returned for use by the business application (outside the rules engine itself). There are computed values that are not exported from the rules engine: these are ephemeral values calculated by the formulas that generate the atomic results. The rules engine is stateless and never retains such results.
An IDIOM formula defines the computation of a single result through a tree of operations (that is, operators and their operands). The graphical representation used for formula development has the following appearance:
Figure 5: Creating formulas in the IDIOM Formula Palette
A formula is built quickly and intuitively by dragging and dropping various resources such as schema nodes and data operations onto the graphical view. The graphical view is a palette on which formula fragments can be assembled and linked at will. A wizard-based approach ensures that operations have the correct number and type of arguments, and that only valid chains of operations can be linked together. By these means, complex rules can be built up quickly and easily.
The graphical approach facilitates rules construction. To communicate the specific intent of the rules for analysis and review a textual presentation is valuable, and IDIOM provides both structured and natural English transformations of the rules. The Logical English style is particularly suitable for a business audience: it provides a concise and completely accurate specification of what will be implemented as computer code.
| Next: "Testing Business Rule Formulas in the IDIOM Decision Suite" |
 
 
|
| Return to News Archive ... |