Link Rules Together

At the project level, Policy Modeling automatically links all attributes with the same text together and treats them as one attribute. This means you can write your rules in any document, or in several documents, in any order within those documents, and Policy Modeling will link them all together for you when you save, provided the same attribute text is used. (Note that attributes with the same text will be linked regardless of any differences in capitalization. That is, "the person lives in Victoria" would be identified as the same attribute as "The person lives in Victoria" or "the person lives in victoria".)

A basic example of linked rules where the condition in one rules i used as the conclusion of another rule is:

Linking also occurs between rules where either the positive or the negative form of an attribute is used. For example, the text "the person is not employed" will be recognized as the negative form of the attribute "the person is employed":

When an attribute is linked with another they are logically collapsed within the Policy Modeling model and displayed as a single item in the attribute list on the Data tab.

Tip: When writing rules in Word, the easiest way to ensure you are using the same text of an attribute is to use the Rule Assistant. When prompted for an attribute to use in a rule, you can type any word or even just part of a word, and a list of existing attributes with matching text will be shown for you to select from.