Rule Analyzer is not a procedural tool. You use it to explore the structure of a project’s ontology and to understand how rules and events interact to affect concepts and scorecards. This section contains a few ideas to get you started, and provides pointers to other sections for more information.
The graph shown in the Analyzer/Dependency panel helps you understand the relationships between entities in the ontology, and the rules that affect and are affected by them. See
Table 40, Explanation of Graph Elements in the Analyzer/Dependency Panel for more details on how items are represented in a graph.
If you are new to BusinessEvents, read the following analysis to learn how the graph exposes various relationships. For example the graph can help you understand:
How Events Affect Rules Any rule whose declaration contains an event that is asserted into the working memory is evaluated. For example, the arrow from the
Debit event (yellow oval) to the
ApplyDebit rule (orange rectangle) indicates that the ApplyDebit rule is evaluated when a Debit event is asserted into working memory.
How Rules Affect Events Events can also be created internally by rule actions. This action can then trigger other rules. For example, a
Suspend event is created by an action in the
PublishSuspendedAcount rule. In a real-world application, the
Suspend event would perhaps change or create a concept, causing another rule to be evaluated, and so on.
How Concepts and Scorecards Affect Rules If a rule’s declaration references a concept, then when an instance of that concept is created or changed, the rule will be evaluated or re-evaluated. Concept creation is indicated by the text
New() on the link between the rule and the concept. It is not necessary to put scorecards in the declaration because there is only one instance of each scorecard in an application. Any change causes all rules that use the scorecard in their conditions to be evaluated.
How Rules Affect Concepts and Scorecards Rules can create, modify and delete concept instances. Rules can modify scorecards. The
FraudDetection rule (shown in the illustration) has a link to the
Account concept, and the word
Status appears on the line. This means that one action of the
FraudDetection rule action is to change the
Status property of an Account instance, when rule conditions are met.
Examining the graph, together with this textual information helps you to understand how the application is structured and how it reacts to events and changes in the entities.