The synchronization mechanism has two main phases:

The first time you publish a rule project the target is initialized. The target can be either SharePoint or the file system. In both cases, the final structure is the same. Every rule artifact is stored into an Office document:

Rule artifacts are also sorted according to the package structure. Each rule artifact in a package is stored in the same document, and each sub-package is stored into a folder in SharePoint or in a directory in the file system. This ensures that the hierarchy in Rule Studio is maintained throughout.

For example, the following hierarchy in Rule Studio:

Package1
      |
      |--- Package11----BusinessRule2
      |
      |---BusinessRule1
Package2
      |
      |---BusinessRule3
BusinessRule4

will generate the following during publication:

The following criteria apply:

The RuleDoc name is generated automatically, based on the Package property and the type of rule artifact it contains. For example, if all the rules, ruleflows, and decision tables in a rule project belong to the Price package, the RuleDocs would be named as follows:

This is true after the first publish, but you can rearrange the rules across the RuleDocs, so this might not remain true after the RuleDocs are edited outside of Rule Studio.

The documents contain everything you need to edit or deploy the rule artifacts. In other words, they contain the rule artifacts, the ruleset parameters, the user schemas, and the Business Object Model (BOM). The vocabulary used by the rule editors is created from this data. Only rule artifacts can be edited outside of Rule Studio. The BOM, ruleset parameters, and the user schemas are read-only resources.

See Also