Business Rules Framework Overview

This topic describes how your agency can use the Business Rules Framework to define and maintain business rules that drive system actions.

The Business Rules Framework is an event-driven framework that enables you to trigger various actions based on the criteria in the business rules you define. A business rule is a collection of logical expressions you construct by evaluating and comparing business object (resource) attributes with common operators, such as equals, not equals, greater than, and so on.

For example, a business rule can be applied to activate a variety of outcomes, including:

• Trigger automatic system communications.

• Update the underlying workflow process.

• Add fees.

• Apply conditions.

Most rules get activated during normal online system processing, but you can also schedule rules for a subset of resources to run at specific times or on a recurring basis.

Oracle Permitting and Licensing delivers a registry of resources, or business objects, for each offering, that define the events applicable to that business object. Given the events and data contained by a resource, your agency can define the rule criteria to drive the desired actions. While the resources and events are system-defined, your agency defines the rules and selects the triggered actions.

Note: The term resource refers to a business object.

The following table describes the main elements in the framework.

Element	Defined by System or Agency	Description
Offering	System	Offerings are the set of applications your agency has licensed. They contain the resources with the data for business operations. For example, Permits and Planing and Zoning are offerings.
Resource	System	Resources are the business objects in the application. For example, the Inspection resource represents the data and activity related to an inspection for a permit.
Event	System	Events are categorized by offering and by business object. They represent specific, predefined occurrences for a business object in a particular offering. For example, with Permits, the Inspection business object contains these events: Inspection Canceled Inspection Rescheduled Inspection Requested Inspection Scheduled Common events apply to all offerings.
Rule	Agency	Rules are based on business requirements and constrain the actions associated with events. A rule contains one or more logical statements as the criteria that drives one or more actions. See Setting Up Business Rules.
Criteria	Agency	Criteria are logical statements that, if satisfied or evaluate to be true on the whole, cause an action to be carried out or stopped. See Setting Up Business Rule Criteria.
Actions	Agency	Actions gets triggered as a result of the criteria in your business rule. Examples of action types include Send Communication, Update Workflow, Add Fee, and so on. Note: The selection of actions available depends on the selected resource (business object). In general, the list of actions to trigger contains the actions that are both applicable and supported for a particular resource. The list varies by resource and event. For more information on the different action types, see the topic in this chapter specific to the action type you want to trigger, such as "Setting Up Add Fee Actions."