Decision Manager, a component of TIBCO BusinessEvents, is an Eclipse-based Rich Client Platform (RCP) application. Its friendly user interface allows business personnel with little or no technical background to author, test, and deploy business rules to the BusinessEvents engine. Decision Manager is the client to a server component called RMS, which is a rules management server. RMS manages the lifecycle of decision projects and provides an approval work flow.
Decision Manager simplifies complex business rules by breaking up the logic into multiple simple rules. Each simple business rule is represented by a row in a decision table.
A decision table is an interface with rows and columns for a business user to define threshold values (conditions) and actions in a tabular format. Each row can be thought of as one rule within a table that is made up of many rules.
In Decision Manager terminology, a rule is a business rule that embodies some business logic. It is not the same as a rule in BusinessEvents. In fact, when a decision table is deployed to BusinessEvents, it forms the body of a BusinessEvents
rule function. Like any rule function it can be called by a BusinessEvents rule, act as an event preprocessor, and so on. To learn about BusinessEvents rules and rule functions, refer to
TIBCO BusinessEvents User’s Guide.
In order to work with Decision Manager decision tables, a BusinessEvents project must contain one or more virtual rule functions. A
virtual rule function (VRF) is a BusinessEvents rule function with no body, similar to a Java interface. VRFs are brought into Decision Manager (using the project EAR file), where decision tables provide the body (that is, the implementation). The implementation classes are then deployed to the BusinessEvents application.
Decision Manager enables business users to focus on business logic. It breaks complex rule logic into multiple simpler rules. Here is an example of a fairly complex rule:
Using the rules management server (RMS) a more technical user, generally referred to as a
rule administrator, builds RMS projects. RMS is also used by technical users to check and approve (or reject) decision tables submitted by business users before they are deployed.
A less technical user, a role referred to as a business user, checks out an
RMS project and saves it locally as a
decision project. The user works with the decision project—saving, modifying, validating, testing, and so on—before committing it to RMS for approval. See
Introduction to Rules Management Server for more information.