TIBCO BusinessEvents: Workflow

1. User in your enterprise creates a TIBCO Designer project, creates an ontology, and writes rules that makes use of virtual rule functions to be implemented later by a business user using decision tables.
2. IT Administrator takes the Designer project and sets up the RMS.
3. IT Administrator starts the TIBCO BusinessEvents Rules Management Server.
4. Business user logs in with valid credentials and requests decision project by checking it out and saving it to the disk.
5. Depending on the permissions given by the Rule Administrator, business user creates a decision table.
6. The business user saves the modified decision project locally.
7. The business user tests the decision tables locally with a locally running BusinessEvents engine started by Decision Manager automatically.
8. The business user submits the modified or the new decision table for approval once done with the project.
9. Rule Administrator receives the request and approves or rejects the project.10.Rule Administrator takes the deployed class files generated automatically and deploys them to a production BusinessEvents engine.

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BusinessEvents: User Roles of Decision Manager

Explaining about different user roles of Decision Manager, and various tasks that they can undertake.

Decision Manager has the following End Users:

• Business User: In this role, you use the client application to update the existing projects by creating decision tables in a decision project, modifying the tables, checking-in and checking-out the decision projects and submitting the projects for approval to the Approver.
• Rule Administrator: In this role, you setup RMS, create and set up the projects, and ensure proper deployment. You decide what the business user can do using Decision Manager. You could fulfill the roles of the Approver and Deployer as well.
• Approver: In this role, you use the client application to approve or deny decision projects committed by the business users.
• Deployer: In this role, you use the client application to select approved entities and deploy or undeploy them.
• Developer: This user customizes the client and or uses it as a User Interface (UI) component library. This user can perform the following:

1. Configuring the business user’s user interface
2. Writing the new UI components
3. Creating project structure model—Authoring rules
4. Authoring rules
5. Creating and validating deployment process
6. Verifying the entire system before releasing it to the rest of the organization

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BusinessEvents: About Rules Management Server

The lightweight Rules Management Server (RMS), a product of TIBCOBusinessEvents family, serves as a rules management repository. RMS is builtusing TIBCO BusinessEvents itself. Decision Manager communicates with this server to retrieve rules and other artifacts, get updates, commit them, approve orreject those rules, and deploy them to a production system. Only one decision project can be made available to the users per RMS instance. RMS allows you to:

• Authenticate against an LDAP or file-based system
• Access to certain parts of a project depending on your user role
• Checkout a project
• Get updates to that project
• Commit your project
• See the status of your project

If you have logged in to RMS as a Rule Administrator, it allows you to:

• Set up projects with domain models and test data pre-defined, as well as set project security policies
• Approve or reject committed projects and give feedback to the business users
• Check on the status of all projects committed and keep track of all project versions
• Deploy approved rules to a running TIBCO BusinessEvents engine of your choice

The RMS is implemented using TIBCO BusinessEvents. It contains a statemachine, rules, events, and catalog functions. The TIBCO Designer source code to this implementation is provided in the distribution in the BE_HOME/rms/projectdirectory. If you wish to customize the default behavior, you modify this project.

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TIBCO BusinessEvents: About Decision Manager

Decision Manager, a component in the BusinessEvents family, 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 rules to the BusinessEvents engine. It simplifies complex rules by breaking them into multiple simple rules. Each simple rule is represented by a row in a decision table. It also provides IT personnel an easy, secure, and scripted deployment lifecycle by exposing an extensible Rules Management System.

Different users can use this application differently. Users include:

• Business User
• Developer
• Rule Administrator

The business user uses this application to write, test, and maintain decisions without having to know the underlying technical details or writing code. The business user can drag and drop the properties of entities (concepts and events) to create decision logic and simulate the rules, without understanding the rule language. Developers use this application to define, modify, and deploy the configuration of a rule system, with minimal supervision and minimal implementation overhead.

In the Decision Manager application, Decision Table is an interface with rows and columns for a business user to capture threshold values and business rules in a tabular format.

The Decision Manager application enables business users to easily create simple BusinessEvents rules using the decision table feature. A decision table is a user interface with rows and columns.

Decision Tables are used to provide an implementation to Virtual Rule Functions created in TIBCO Designer. In TIBCO Designer, you cannot set the Output Argument or Return type of Virtual Rule Function. The virtual rule functions by definition have no implementation and if invoked from a rule without one will throw an exception. Thus, a decision table can be used to provide implementations to such virtual rule functions.

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