- From: Costello, Roger L. <costello@mitre.org>
- Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:13:09 -0400
- To: "xproc-dev@w3.org" <xproc-dev@w3.org>
Hi Folks, XProc can be a great way to express business rules. On the xml-dev list we had an illuminating discussion that revealed the difference between structural rules and business rules. Here are a few examples of business rules: A Level 1 manager has a maximum signature authority of $10K. An auto loan applicant, living in Ohio, is underage if he/she is under 18 years of age. If a customer has no outstanding invoices, then the customer is of preferred status. An underage applicant for an auto loan on a high-powered sports cars is not eligible. Consider that last one. That rule depends on a rule to determine if the applicant is underage, and a rule to determine if the car is a high-powered sports car: Is-underage ---> Is-Eligible ^ | Is-high-powered-sports-car --| XProc can do this! An Is-underage step can be created, and an Is-high-powered-sports-car step can be created, and they can be fed into an Is-Eligible step. Analyzing business rules requires checking dependencies, consistency, and completeness. Checking dependencies is easy in XProc: just check the connections between the steps. I'm not sure how to check consistency and completeness. I think that XProc could be used as the basis for an XML-based Business Rules Management System (BRMS) by providing along with an XProc processor a WYSIWYG tool, a test harness, and maybe a couple other things. What do you think? /Roger
Received on Wednesday, 17 June 2009 20:13:43 UTC