ILOG Rules for .NET User Guides > Rule Studio > Writing Rules

Writing Rules

Business rules let you express your policy statements using predefined business vocabulary that can be interpreted by a computer. The vocabulary is the set of terms and phrases attached to the elements of the Business Object Model (BOM), ruleset parameters, local variables, and constants. Whether a vocabulary element is a business term, a phrase, or a constant depends on the nature of its corresponding business element.

For example, the policy "change customers in the Gold category to the Platinum category when they spend $1,500 or more in a single transaction" can be expressed as a business rule in the following way:

 if
     all of the following conditions are true:
        - the customer category is Gold
        - the value of the shopping cart is more than $1,500
 then
     change the customer category to Platinum;

The customer in this rule is a business term that corresponds to a class or nested class in the BOM.

Vocabulary elements appear in the completion menu of the Intellirule Editor. You can access a completion menu in the editor by pressing CTRL+SPACE, or you can select the option Display completion menu in the editor properties and use SPACE (in this mode SPACE inserts a space character and opens the completion menu to help you finish your sentence or phrase).

The Intellirule Editor in Rule Studio also allows you to write your business rules freely, just like you would write a line of text in any text editor. The Intellirule Editor then breaks the text that you type into the building blocks of the supporting vocabulary. If the editor cannot recognize a block that you have typed, you will be prompted to check the vocabulary of your business domain. Any errors in the text that you type will appear in the Error List.

Note

Free text and the vocabulary completion menus work together without conflict or disagreement.

To learn how to write and edit rules read the following section:

Using the Intellirule Editor - Explains how to use the editor to create new rules and edit existing ones.

And then discover the different parts of a business rule:

Definitions - Used to declare variables that are subsequently used in the rest of the rule.
Conditions - The conditions of a rule.
Actions - The actions to carry out when the conditions of a rule are met.