Decision reports may sometimes be too succinct to provide a user with a useful explanation of reasons for a decision. There are several ways you can add more information to decision reports.
Sometimes when silent and/or invisible parameters have been used in the rules to hide attributes and decision trees, the resulting decision reports can be difficult to read and understand. In this case you may need to find where these parameters have been used and remove them. To do this:
In Oracle Policy Modeling, select Build | Build and Debug.
In the Debug Options dialog box, select the Without screens option, then click OK.
In the Data view, select the attribute you are interested in, right-click and select Investigate. TIP: It may be most effective to identify an intermediate goal proving the section of your rules that you wish to examine, and check this attribute for silent and invisible operators applied to its influencing attributes.
In the Decision view, select the option to Show silent and invisible. If this changes the decision view, then silent and/or invisible operators are being applied to the attributes in the decision view.
If this is the case, identify the attribute(s) that are affected, then open the properties file for the project and double-click the attribute to open the Attribute Editor.
Select the Decision Reports tab and see if there any silent and/or invisible parameters set. If so, remove them.
If the attribute does not have any silent and/or invisible parameters set on it in the properties file, then these operators must be operating at the rule level rather than globally. Open the rules document containing the rule, locate the rule and delete the silent and/or invisible operator.
Repeat steps 5 to 7 for all relevant attributes in your decision report, until you are satisfied that all appropriate attributes are being displayed correctly.
Substitute the value of an attribute for its text
You can substitute the text of a variable with its actual value when it is used in another attribute in the rulebase. This substitution can make decision reports much more meaningful, for example:
the claimant’s sibling lives in the claimant’s sibling’s country with the claimant
can become:
Charlene lives in Morocco with Anne
where "the claimant’s sibling", "the claimant’s sibling’s country" and "the claimant" are all substituting variables.
You can show the names of entity instances in decision reports to improve the readability of your decision report and make it clear which entity instance is being referred to. There are two places to do this:
In entity-level attributes. To substitute the name of the entity instance into entity-level attributes (eg "David's date of birth is 10/03/96" instead of "The child's date of birth is 10/03/96") and into relationship text (eg "David's school" instead of "the child's school"), you need to set up attribute substitution. See Substitute the actual value of a variable for its text for details of how to set this up.
In lists of entity instances. To show the name of each entity instance in the details of entity or relationship collect screens (eg "Sydney High", "Melbourne High", "Perth High" instead of generic labels like "#1", "#2", "#3" for the entity 'the school'), you need to have an identifying attribute for the entity. By default, an identifying attribute is automatically created when a new entity is created, so typically this will already work. (For details on how to set up an identifying attribute if you don't already have one, click here.)
