Integrate your own custom functions with TIBCO BusinessEvents

TIBCO BusinessEvents allows you to write your own custom functions in Javaand add them to the function registry, making them available from within thefunction registry along with the prepackaged functions in the rule editor.The steps below summarize the tasks required to integrate your own customfunctions with TIBCO BusinessEvents:

1. Write your custom static function in Java and compile it.
2. Create functions.catalog, an XML file that makes it possible to access yourcustom functions from the functions registry within the rule editor. The XMLcan also include information for a tool tip for each function.
3. Create a .jar file that includes your .class file and functions.catalog.
4. Add the location of the .jar file to the class path for the BusinessEventsServer and Workbench. Also add locations for any dependent classes.

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BusinessEvents: Validating a Decision Table

Validate the decision table before testing or committing it to RMS. To validate,from Table menu, select Validate. If there are any access control violations orsyntax errors in the tables, they are shown in the Problems View tab at the bottomof the application. Take corrective actions and then validate the table again untilall errors are resolved.

NullPointerExceptions are silently ignored when a condition throws such anexception because you passed a null String to a function that does not check fornull, or because you accessed a property of a null contained concept(parent.child.property and child is null).

If a condition table cell is empty, it is skipped and thus considered to be evaluatedas true.

While working on the decision project, you can create multiple virtual rulefunction implementations by creating multiple decision tables. However, before committing the decision project to RMS, you should only commit one decisiontable per virtual rule function. During testing you can have multiple tables so youcan decide which ones to deploy to the engine and test. However, if you commitall implementations, only the last one will take effect if all of them are deployed.

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BusinessEvents:Importing a Decision Table from a Microsoft Excel File

You can import data from a Microsoft Excel file to create a decision table. For some examples see BE_HOME/DecisionManager/examples/ExcelFiles.

To import data:

1. Open the Decision Project.
2. From File menu, select Import. A browse window is displayed.
3. Click Browse to select the Microsoft Excel file to import, and name your decision table.
4. Select the virtual rule function you want to implement with your decision table, and click OK.The data imported from the Microsoft Excel file is saved to the decision table and you can continue modifying the data or add new data.

For custom conditions, and custom actions to be imported from Excel, mark the header names as "CustomCondition" and "CustomAction" respectively.

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BusinessEvents: Working with Decision Tables

• Click Add to add rows. Enter the data in the new cells or drag and drop the properties form Argument Explorer.
• Click Fit Content to resize the columns so they fit around the text.
• You can search for certain values by entering text in the Search field.
• Click Show Text button to see the contents of the cell, instead of just the values you are comparing with for the attributes you have dragged to the condition and action areas.
• Drag and drop the catalog functions you see collapsed by default on the right side of the application. Drag and drop them to the function area (marked by the ) or to the cell you are editing. For example, if you want to compare some attribute that is of type integer against the rounded value of "39.99", you could say in one of your conditions "< Math.round(39.99)" by dragging and dropping the Math round function from the Standard Functions
  window and then entering the arguments of that function.
• Right-click on the condition area on the properties you dragged there to take a few actions relating to the column you have clicked on. For example, you can move the column, remove it, or change other field settings.
• Click on the drop-down menu on the properties dragged to either the condition or the action area to filter out which rows to show based on the values. For example, if you want to see just the Account.AccountType where AccountType is "current" and you want to filter out all the other rows that do not have this value, select the "current" value from the drop-down list that will show you all the values you have entered so far in that column.
• Click Remove to delete rows. If you add more rows after this operation, the row IDs are not reused.
• Right-click on column headers and choose Remove to delete any conditions or actions from the table. You cannot remove the last condition column because a minimum of one condition column must exist if you have any action columns. When you remove columns, certain rows may also get merged if they now share the same values in their condition cells. If this happens, if you have non-custom actions and the rows have the same priority, the last row to be merged will have its actions be merged and the others deleted.
• Select Table > Show Property, to see meta-data of the entire decision table. You can only modify the effective date and the expiration date.

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BusinessEvents: Creating a Decision Table

After successfully logging in to the application, some menu options are enabled depending on the roles that your account belongs to User Roles.

When a business user logs in to the Decision Manager application, the following menu options are enabled:

• Project > Checkout/Update/Commit/Show Status
• File > New/Open/Logout/Exit
• Edit > Select All
• Access menu if you also have the RULE_ADMINISTATOR role

As a business user, you can use Decision Manager to create Decision Tables.To Create a Decision Table

1. Open a decision project.
2. From File menu, select New > Decision Table Rule Function, and choose a name for the Decision Table.
3. Select a Virtual Rule Function that you want to implement from the Project Explorer.
4. Click OK.The arguments of the virtual rule function you are implementing are shown in theArgument Explorer view. Expand the Entities (concepts and events) to see theirproperties from Argument Explorer.
5. Decide on which properties you want to use to make a decision table. Drag and drop those properties onto the Condition or Action area.For example, if the arguments are two concepts called BankUser and Application,you can decide to accept the Application based on a users's age and credit score.In this case, drag and drop BankUser's "age" and BankUser's "creditScore"attributes from the Argument Explorer view to the condition area of the decisiontable. Then, you drag and drop the Application's "status" attribute to the Actionarea.
6. When you are done creating the decision table, click File > Save.

• If two rows end up with the same conditions after you make modifications, they will get merged into one row. All actions will also be merged.
• It is invalid to provide a string property value that starts with an integer (such as "12hello" unless you specifically wrap the value around double quotes.
• Blank cells, or cells that have a * in them, as well as disabled cells are all ignored and automatically treated as true.

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TIBCO BusinessEvents Resources

Access control is enforced for the TIBCO BusinessEvents resources. There are twotypes of access control modes:

• BusinessEvents Resource: This mode is used for populating the Project Explorer view in Decision Manager. BusinessEvents Resource mode is the default mode.


• Domain Model: This model is used for enforcing the Access Control in domain model editor.

The following allows you to create a new domain model entry for any resource which matches the ID AllP.

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BusinessEvents: Access Control System Overview

The Access Control System manages the permissions to the users based on their roles. Using the access control system, the IT Administrator can restrict business users from accessing or modifying certain resources of a Decision Project.

Access control is role based. Thus, the users belonging to same role will have same access permissions. One user can play different roles in an organization, so the user's permissions are a unification of the permissions that each role the user belongs to gets.

By default, all permissions are denied. Each of the permissions must be grantedexplicitly. Permissions do not have hierarchies. The order in which permissionsare specified is irrelevant.

A role can have zero or more permissions. Each role is represented by a name.A Permission can have one Action and a resource for which the action applies. For example, an action could be Read, Write, or Send. A resource or entity could be arule, attribute, and so on. For example, you could specify Read permission for allattributes of a particular concept.

All of these ACL settings are specified in the

%rms.proejct.location%/%rms.project.name%/config/%rms.project.name

%.acl file as specified in the be-rms.tra file.

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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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