Chapter 8 Working with the Approval Process : Working with the Decision Table Approval Process

Working with the Decision Table Approval Process
Business users create, modify, and delete decision tables, test data, and domain models as appropriate. Then they submit their work for approval, as explained in Committing Decision Tables for Approval.
Projects that business users have committed for approval appear in the worklist of users with the role of RULE_ADMINISTRATOR (and any other role configured with this permission). Approvers can approve the project or reject it
See Checking the Status of a Committed Project for the related business user procedure.
Also in the Worklist area is a status that unloads (undeploys) a deployed decision table from a running BusinessEvents engine.
This section is written for users with permissions to perform project approval.
This manual documents the behavior of the product as shipped. The workflow, the roles used, and the permissions granted to the roles are all configurable. However, the general flow is likely to be similar to that described in this guide.
See Decision Manager and RMS Workflow for an overview and see Chapter 2, RMS and Decision Manager Configuration for details about configuration and customization.
Decision Tables
You assign an approval status to each individual commit request for a project. A commit request can contain zero or more decision tables. Most of the content of this chapter deals with the approval process for decision tables.
Test Data
Test data in approved Decision Manager projects is not automatically made available to others. It is considered to be local to each user’s project. However, you can manually copy test data to the RMS project as desired. It is then made available to other Decision Manager users when they check out the project.
Copy the data files and subdirectories from the DecisionProject/data to the RMSProject/data directory.
See Testing Decision Tables for more details.
Domain Model File
An approved domain model file automatically overwrites the RMS project domain model file. Domain model files are also versioned, similar to all decision table files.
The domain model file itself is not visible for separate approval. When a user commits a decision table for approval, any domain model changes made (if any) are also committed. Upon approval, the updated domain model replaces the master copy in RMS.
Understanding Approval Actions and Status Values
When a user commits one or more resources for approval, the status of the request is set to Approval Pending. The approver then sets the status as appropriate.
You can set the Action field on a decision project resource to the following values:
Approve
When you approve a project for deployment, the following actions occur:
When you approve a project for deletion, the following actions occur:
Reject
Informs the business user that the change has been rejected. It is the business user’s responsibility to take appropriate action, such as deleting their local copy.
Unload
This option applies only to decision tables that have been deployed to the BusinessEvents production system and whose current status is Approve (or Approval Pending, after a failed unload).
When you choose unload RMS undeploys the table from a production BusinessEvents system. This action can only be done when the BusinessEvents system is running.
If unload fails, the table’s status returns to Approval Pending. From that status you can again attempt to set the Action to Unload. See Chapter 9, Deploying and Unloading Decision Tables for more details.
Checking a Worklist and Taking Action on Project Resources
To Check Your Worklist
1.
From the Access menu, select Show Worklist for and select one of the roles. Roles displayed have permission to approve projects.
Decision Manager connects to RMS and displays all the requests submitted for approval.
2.
3.
To examine the decision table before taking an action, double-click a resource in the Request Details panel. the decision table displays in another view.
4.
See Understanding Approval Actions and Status Values for more details.
5.
Click Submit. The Status fields display the status you chose in the Action field.