Projects created in old versions of Oracle Policy Modeling can be opened and upgraded using the Upgrade Project wizard. The treatment of entities and their containment relationships in particular must be brought up to date from older project versions, which is done automatically by the wizard. Other changes in the behavior of Oracle Policy Modeling will need your consideration to determine if you need to make any manual changes to your project.
Upgrade a project using the Upgrade Project wizard
Understand changes in the behavior of Oracle Policy Modeling
To upgrade a project created in an older version of Oracle Policy Modeling:
The wizard will also upgrade an older properties file added to a new project in this way.
The Upgrade Project wizard applies the following principles in upgrading entities and their containment relationships:
The Radio Buttons option for boolean inputs on screen controls has been removed. This means that if an existing project uses the Radio Buttons option with default values, you will need to delete the control and recreate it using the Default option (which creates radio buttons for booleans).
The 'output' folder is now a strict output folder and can no longer be used to include additional files in the compiled rulebase zip file. If you have any other files stored in the output folder of your project, you will need to move these to the 'include' folder to have them included in the compiled rulebase zip file.
The various time/date difference functions (MinuteDifference, HourDifference, DayDifference, WeekDifference, etc) no longer return 0 in the case where the first time/date parameter is after the second time/date parameter. This means that the order of the two parameters is no longer significant, for example, "the number of days between X and Y" will produce the same result as "the number of days between Y and X".
If your rules using these time/date difference functions are relying on a 0 result, or you want to ensure that you get exactly the same behavior as previously, you will need to build some extra logic into your rules to set the conclusion to 0 if the second date is before the first date.
Any condition row proving a conclusion in a merged cell can now evaluate in any order. This means that a rulebase outcome in this release may be known earlier than in previous versions. To have your rules evaluate in the top-down order of previous versions, unmerge your conclusion cells.
If you want to use a text function in an Excel rule table you now need to put the function text in parentheses. Existing projects that use text functions will need to have parentheses added, otherwise the function will be treated as a text value.
If you want to use an attribute's value in the condition or conclusion of a text attribute in an Excel rule table, you now need to put the attribute text in parentheses. Existing projects that use attributes in such rule talbes will need to have parentheses added, otherwise the attribute text will be treated as a text value.
Changes made to how Excel processes cell contents have affected the way quoted text is interpreted. This means that double quotes, instead of single quotes, should now be used.
There are two significant consequences of the changes to how unknown relationship reasoning now operates.
The first is that backward chaining knows more about what information might possibly be required in chasing down a goal.
For example, say your rulebase has household members, and each household member refers to some global property such as the number of bedrooms in the residence. Previously you actually needed to create a household member before the engine knew that the bedroom-count could be required. Now it can actually reason about a 'hypothetical' household member and from there work out the bedroom-count is a question that may need be to be asked.
The second consequence is that the engine can also sometimes draw conclusions in cases where it previously did not think it could.
Say, for example, that you have the following rule:
the parent does not require disability carer's assistance if
Exists(the parent's children, the child has a disability)
And you have a bunch of a children and a bunch of parents, but you haven't yet said who is the parent of who (ie both parent and child are global-level entities). If none of the children have a disability, the engine will now infer that none of the parents require disability carer's assistance. It knows this because even without knowing who a person's children are, it knows that none of the hypothetical candidates could fulfill the criteria, therefore the conclusion is definitively false.
When you Build and Debug with Screens, or Build and Run with Web Determinations, if the 'Replace deployed version' option is turned off, and the Web Determinations template version is not the same as the current version of Oracle Policy Modeling, the following warning will be displayed:
"The currently deployed version of Web Determinations is not the version expected by Oracle Policy Modeling. This might cause problems during runtime. Do you want to continue?"
To prevent this warning from being shown, select the option to replace your currently deployed version of Web Determinations in the Debug Options or Build and Run dialog. (This is not done automatically in case the user has customized Web Determinations.)
A document will be created based on the document control information in a project created in a version of Oracle Policy Modeling prior to 10.3.0. The resulting document will not have an RTF template associated with it (since previous versions used XSLT) so this will generate a build warning that will need to be manually addressed in the project. Also, any previously specified decision reports that do not have public names will also cause build warnings and will need to be updated.
When an existing translation document is opened, a new column "Unformatted Text" will have been added to the Statements (3rd Person) and Variables (3rd Person) worksheets. It will contain non-translated fields which will need to be translated with the basic form of the attribute. See Update a translation file for how to do this.
See also: