Siebel Personalization Administration Guide > Content Targeting > Content Targeting Steps >

Rule Set Evaluation

Rule sets are evaluated in the order of the sequence numbers you enter.

If a rule set is evaluated and no content or records are returned, or if the conditional expression associated with the rule set evaluates to FALSE, the next rule set is evaluated. Processing continues until a rule set returns content. As soon as a rule set returns content, processing stops. Subsequent rule sets in the sequence are not evaluated.

You can also use conditional expressions to set up Boolean logic (IF, AND, OR) among the rule sets associated with a view or an applet to create a more complex flow of evaluation.

The results of the evaluation of all the rules in the set are returned to the underlying business component associated with the applet in the form of a search expression. This search expression controls the content displayed in the applet.

Limiting the number of rule sets is good practice. This is because each rule set is a query built by adding all the rules together. The rules contribute to the final query, but do not cause a query by themselves. Therefore, you can create as many rules as you like, but create rules sets carefully.

The sequence you set for rule set evaluation is important. If the system must evaluate many rule sets before getting one that returns content, performance can be affected noticeably.

One way of managing the overhead on executing rule sets is to add a conditional expression to the rule set that evaluates to FALSE when the rule set is unlikely to return any records. This causes the rule set to be skipped whenever it is unlikely to find content.

For example, rule set 1 is based on the user's age as calculated from their birthday and rule sets 2 and 3 are based on other information. If the user has not entered his or her birthday, then his or her age cannot be calculated. If you put a conditional expression on rule set 1 that evaluates to FALSE if the birthday attribute is blank, then the rule set is not evaluated.


 Siebel Personalization Administration Guide 
 Published: 18 April 2003