What Are Decision Tables? What Are Facts and Bucketsets? What Are Rulesets?

1-4 Oracle Fusion Middleware Users Guide for Oracle Business Rules ■ Chapter 4, Working with Rulesets and Rules ■ Ordering Rule Firing in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Language Reference Guide for Oracle Business Rules 1.1.3 What Are Decision Tables? A Decision Table is an alternative business rule format that is more compact and intuitive when many rules are needed to analyze many combinations of property values. You can use a Decision Table to create a set of rules that covers all combinations or where no two combinations conflict. For more information, see Chapter 5, Working with Decision Tables . 1.1.4 What Are Facts and Bucketsets? In Oracle Business Rules, facts are the objects that rules reason on. Each fact is an instance of a fact type. You must import or create one or more fact types before you can create rules. In Oracle Business Rules a fact is an asserted instance of a class. The Oracle Business Rules runtime or a developer writing in the RL Language uses the RL Language assert function to add an instance of a fact to the Oracle Business Rules Engine. In Rules Designer you can define a variety of fact types based on, XML Schema, Java classes, Oracle RL definitions, and ADF Business Components view objects. In the Oracle Business Rules runtime such fact type instances are called facts. You can create bucketsets to define a list of values or a range of values of a specified type. After you create a bucketset you can associate the bucketset with a fact property of matching type. Oracle Business Rules uses the bucketsets that you define to specify constraints on the values associated with fact properties in rules or in Decision Tables. You can also use bucketsets to specify constraints for variable initial values and function return values or function argument values. For more information, see: ■ Section 1.3, Oracle Business Rules Engine Architecture ■ Chapter 3, Working with Facts and Bucketsets 1.1.5 What Are Rulesets? A ruleset is an Oracle Business Rules container for rules and Decision Tables. A ruleset provides a namespace, similar to a Java package, for rules and Decision Tables. In addition you can use rulesets to partially order rule firing. For more information, see: ■ Chapter 4, Working with Rulesets and Rules ■ Ordering Rule Firing in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Language Reference Guide for Oracle Business Rules 1.1.6 What Are Decision Functions?