Defining rules with Rule Wizards

Business Rules enable you to monitor business events and messages and to control business processes. In Business Process Server, you can use BPM Events, which is the business rule engine, to create and manage business rules. For information regarding business rules, see the BPM Events User’s Guide.

Progress Developer Studio for OpenEdge enables you to define rules for selected worksteps of a Business Process. You can define rules using the Rule Wizards (as described in this chapter) and then customize your rules (as described in the Customizing rules using Rule Editor).

Note: You cannot define business rules for Web applications.

Progress Developer Studio for OpenEdge provides a group of Rule Wizards with intuitive graphical user interfaces that you can use to quickly create simple or complex rules for the current process or a specific workstep.

A Rule Wizard is an intuitive graphical user interface that enables you to define a set of rules and reuse it in multiple applications.

Rule wizards provide the following benefits:

You do not have to duplicate rules for each application.

Customized rules can be carried over from other applications.

Reliable and tested rule wizards speed up application development time.

You do not necessarily need to know the rule language.

Progress Developer Studio for OpenEdge provides the following Rule Wizards arranged under the respective category:

Table 92. Rule Wizards
Category	Rule Name	Rule Description	For more information, see...
General	New Rule	Provides a blank, generic set of rules that can be applied to a process or an Activity workstep.	Using the New Rule wizard.
General	Schedule	Enables you to automatically schedule or defer actions that must be executed on or before a particular date or time. Can be applied only to a process.	Using the Schedule Rule wizard.
Notification	Process Path	Enables you to specify the timeout value for a process path, that is, a set of worksteps within a process template. This is an expanded version of the Time-out rule, and can be applied to a process or an Activity workstep.	Using the Process Path Rule wizard.
Notification	Time-Out	Provides a set of rules that is applied if a workstep has not finished by a specified time. Can only be applied to an Activity workstep.	Using the Time-Out Rule wizard.
Metrics	Monitoring	Provides a set of rules that enables you to set specific workstep monitoring actions. Can be applied to a process or an Activity workstep.	Using the Monitoring Rule wizard.
	Business Metric	Enables business managers who need to monitor a business process to define a process’s business metrics. Can only be applied to an Activity workstep.	Using the Business Metric Rule wizard.
	Decision Counter	Enables you to keep track of the number of times a particular path out of a Decision gateway has been taken for a specific process. Can only be applied to a Decision gateway.	Using the Decision Counter Rule wizard.
Task Management	Task Assignment	Provides a set of rules that enable you to define criteria that automatically assigns tasks. Can only be applied to an Activity workstep performed by ANY member of a group.	Using the Task Assignment Rule wizard.
Integration	Process Control	Enables you to receive XML messages from external applications that trigger the execution of rules. Can only be applied to a process.	Using the Process Control Rule wizard.
Integration	File Poller	Enables you to poll a file system for specific events or patterns, triggering a user-defined rule to process the system event. Can only be applied to a process.	Using the File Poller Rule wizard.

Note: The application name (as it appears in rule module headers and in the PROCESS TEMPLATENAME attribute of BP Server events) can be up to 18 characters.

In this section: