Preface

Audience

Rules Language Reference for Oracle Business Process Management is intended for application developers and Oracle Application Server administrators who perform the following tasks:

Develop rule enabled applications
Debug rule enabled applications
Deploy and Administer rule enabled applications.
Develop rulesets for those who prefer a technical language environment instead of the Oracle Business Rules graphical environment for rule authoring.
Need to use Oracle Business Rules RL Language advanced features that are not available in the Oracle Business Rules environment.

To use this document, you need to be familiar with the Java programming language.

Documentation Accessibility

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Conventions

This section describes the conventions used in the text and code examples of this documentation set. It describes:

Conventions in Text

Convention	Meaning
boldface	Boldface type indicates graphical user interface elements associated with an action, or terms defined in text or the glossary.
italic	Italic type indicates book titles, emphasis, or placeholder variables for which you supply particular values.
`monospace`	Monospace type indicates commands within a paragraph, URLs, code in examples, text that appears on the screen, or text that you enter.

RL Language Backus-Naur Form Grammar Rules

Each RL Language command in the guide is shown in a format description that consists of a variant of Backus-Naur Form (BNF) that includes the symbols and conventions in the following table.

Symbol or Convention	Meaning
[ ]	Brackets enclose optional items.
{ }	Braces enclose items only one of which is required.
\|	A vertical bar separates alternatives within brackets or braces.
*	A star indicates that an element can be repeated.
delimiters	Delimiters other than brackets, braces, vertical bars, stars, and ellipses must be entered as shown.
boldface	Words appearing in boldface are keywords. They must be typed as shown. (Keywords are case-sensitive in some, but not all, operating systems.) Words that are not in boldface are placeholders for which you must substitute a name or value
underline	When on the left side of a production ( `::=` ) indicates a definition for a non-terminal symbol.
underline	When found on the right side of a production, `::=` , a link, which is a non-terminal symbol, links to the definition for the non-terminal symbol.
italic text	Semantic information about non-terminals, such as the required data type for an expression or a descriptive tag used in following discussion, is in italics.