Try OpenEdge Now
skip to main content
OpenEdge Business Rules
Introducing OpenEdge Business Rules : Concepts : Terminology related to OpenEdge Business Rules
 

Terminology related to OpenEdge Business Rules

The following terms describe the various components that apply to an integrated development environment of OpenEdge and Corticon:
Component
Description
ProDataSet
A predefined view of data usually from multiple data sources (such as temp tables and database buffers) that are related to each other through data relationships.
It is a potentially complex in-memory data structure that can be passed as a single parameter with a single handle from one procedure to another, within a single OpenEdge session or between sessions.
Vocabulary
A structured dictionary containing all necessary business terms and relationships between them used by the Business Rules.
It is an eCore model that defines a relational data structure against which rules are applied. The relational data structure contains domains, entities, attributes and relationships (including cardinality), and maps to the ABL file’s ProDataSet and temp-tables. A Vocabulary is used to build rule models in a Rulesheet or test cases in a Ruletest.
Rulesheet
A set of rules (conditions and actions and plain language statements) written from a common business Vocabulary. By organizing these rules, it becomes a self-contained, independent unit of automated decision-making.
Ruleflow
A set of one or more Rulesheets organized for sequential execution.
A Ruleflow aggregates and organizes Rulesheets into a single unit of automated decision-making. It may be assembled from multiple Rulesheets, provided that all the Rulesheets use the same Vocabulary file. In other words, a Ruleflow can have only one associated Vocabulary. After a Ruleflow has been saved and deployed to the Corticon Server, it is called a Decision Service.
Ruletest
A mechanism within Corticon Studio for creating use cases or test scenarios of sample data and sending them to a Rulesheet or Ruleflow for processing.
Ruletests consist of one or more Testsheets which test independent Rulesheets or Ruleflows, or can be linked together to test a succession of Rulesheets or Ruleflows to simulate a process sequence. Like Rulesheets, Ruletests also use a common Vocabulary model.
Decision Service
Automates a discrete decision-making task.
A Decision Service is implemented as a set of Business Rules and exposed as a web service or a Java service. By definition, the rules within a Decision Service are complete and unambiguous. For a given set of inputs, a Decision Service addresses every logical possibility uniquely, ensuring decision integrity. After they are deployed to the Corticon server, Ruleflows become Decision Services. Multiple versions of a single Decision Services can be deployed concurrently.
Business Rules server
A high-performance and scalable system resource that manages pools of Decision Services and executes their rules against incoming requests.
It can be easily configured as a Web Services server that exposes Decision Services as true Web Services.