Oracle Policy Modeling now enables you to combine policy models from multiple teams or projects, and easily update them as needed. This reduces the risk of large policy automation projects and means that common policies across projects/divisions/systems can be readily shared. To do this you build your rulebase as a module, and then link to this module from other projects.
The user interface for defining data models in Policy Modeling projects has been simplified. Creating an entity in a properties file is now a quick one-step process that automatically sets up the containment relationship, as well as the identifying attribute for the entity. (The default containment relationship, and the default identifying attribute, can later be edited.) The user interface for editing containment and reference relationships is now consistent.
In Oracle Policy Modeling you can now write policy models that determine which entity instances must exist. This means that there is no need to pre-create each entity instance that might be needed. Decision reports show why entity instances have been created.
The batch processor is a replacement for the Data Source Connector and allows a large number of 'cases' to be processed in batch. It has made it possible to easily analyze a policy model to see the results it will yield (using What-If Analysis documents). The batch processor can also be used to generate test scripts from existing Excel data.
There is a new report, Test Script Coverage, that enables you to measure the coverage of the test cases in a project. This helps to identify how you could improve the overall coverage of a test suite.
In Oracle Policy Modeling you can now use BI Publisher to author document templates in Word which can be used with Oracle Web Determinations to generate interview documents.
Syntactic parsers are new for the following languages: Italian, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (European), Russian. From the Help menu in Oracle Policy Modeling you can now access a list of available languages. This lists each language parser with its version number and the type of parser (ie Syntactic or RLS).
Translations, which are included in an Excel translation document, can now be marked as not requiring translation using an Ignore Translation button on the Oracle Policy Modeling toolbar. This is useful where the translation of an item is intended to be the same as in the original rule language (ie it is language-independent).
There are special considerations that need to taken into account when writing rules in particular non-English languages. Documentation has been provided which explains what is supported (ie sentence structures and verb forms) and any limitations that you need to be aware of when writing rules in these languages.
Goals, screen flows and labels which operate at entity level may now be added to a summary screen, by creating a summary screen folder associated with the relevant entity.
Entity-level attributes may also be used for visibility, dynamic default, mandatory and read-only settings.
Public names may now be assigned to screen flows.
Translations can now be added to a rulebase via an Excel translation document. The document is created by Oracle Policy Modeling and populated with all rulebase strings needing translation. The translations can then be filled out in the Excel document and compiled to produce a translated rulebase that may be run in Oracle Web Determinations.
The concept of the project locale has now been divided into a separate rule language and region, to better handle deployments involving one language used across multiple regions and vice versa. The data entry formats in Oracle Policy Modeling, Word/Excel rules, the debugger and Oracle Web Determinations are now restricted in line with this (essentially for Oracle Policy Modeling and the debugger to require basic format, and Web Determinations according to the rulebase region setting).
Containment relationships are now an integral part of the data model for a rulebase. All entities must be defined within the context of a containment relationship, such that the network of containment relationships in the rulebase represents the main data structure of the rulebase. Additional relationships between entities are defined as reference relationships as required. Singleton entities have now been fully deprecated.
Projects created in versions of Oracle Policy Modeling prior to 10.2 are upgraded automatically when opened. Containment relationships are defined for the upgraded rulebase based on a number of principles applied to the old relationship structure of the rulebase pre-upgrade.
The rules generated from Excel decision tables have been optimized to produce smaller and more efficient rules. In particular, the way merged conclusion cells are interpreted has been revised, so that any condition row proving a conclusion in a merged cell can evaluate in any order. The usual "top-down" evaluation order applies to rows if their conclusion cells are not merged.
It is now also possible to use entity attributes in Excel decision tables, and to use most entity functions.
Rule loops are now permitted as a valid part of a rulebase. A normal rule may be defined as a rule loop by using a Configuration element for the rule. Loops may also now be created between attributes proved in shortcut rules.
The following new text functions are available:
The following new temporal functions are available:
A Preview option is now available during the development of question screens which quickly and easily displays the question screen as it will appear in Oracle Web Determinations, without needing to complete an interview. If a debug session already exists, any data from the session is used to display the screen preview.
Custom functions may now be called in the same way as any of the built-in functions in Oracle Policy Modeling, with input and return values defined entirely by the custom function implementation.
A new operator 'currently known' is now available, to test whether or not an attribute has a value, without causing it to be investigated in the question search.
Subversion is now integrated directly into Oracle Policy Modeling. This provides access to rule file history and version comparisons.
The temporal visualization view in the debugger will now persist when the debugger is restarted, and when the project or Oracle Policy Modeling is closed and reopened.
The error message shown for maximum/minimum/regular expression validations on an attribute can now be specified in the Attribute Editor.
The text used for the Add Instance and Remove Instance buttons on entity collect screens in Oracle Web Determinations can now be specified in the Screen Editor.
A "Locate in Explorer" option is now available on rulebase files in the Project Explorer, to open the selected file's folder in Windows Explorer.
When you restart a debugger session now, you have the option to retain current session data. The rulebase will be built and then the debugger will restart and attempt to reload the old session data into the new debugger session. Data for an attribute, entity or relationship will only be lost if it has changed text and public name.
The Function Reference list which is available from the Help menu in Oracle Policy Modeling now includes the description of the function in the native language.
The Function Reference list is also now available and searchable in the Oracle Policy Modeling User's Guide.
The rule authoring experience in Word and Excel is now fully localized for every syntactic and non-syntactic parser language.
A complete function reference is also available for every language from the Help menu.
Command-line support has been added for the regression tester. The C# project "RegressionTester.CmdLine.exe" within the regression tester solution provides an executable that allows a rulebase project's test scripts to be executed from the command line.
InstanceValueIf is a new function for Oracle Policy Modeling. The rule author can now get a value from a unique entity instance, identified from the target entity instances of a relationship by a condition.
If the condition identifies a single target entity instance, then the value is the value calculated against that entity instance.
If more than one target instance meets the condition, then Uncertain is returned.
If no target instances meet the condition and the relationship is known, then the value is Uncertain.
There are files that are useful to include in the rulebase zip, such as configuration for custom functions and commentary for Web Determinations. These files can now be placed inside a folder called "include" in the project directory and they will be automatically added to the rulebase zip at build time.
This was previously possible by copying those same files into the "output" folder but this meant the output folder included a mixture of generated files and source files. Now the output folder can be safely excluded from source control, and deleted to ensure old output files are not left lying around.
Enhancements have been made to enable rule authors to:
In previous versions, it was only possible to write rules while referring to one entity at a time. With an entity function, such as Exists or ForAll, the rule author could reason across a single relationship to the target entities, but these functions had a very limited application.
In Oracle Policy Modeling 10.0, rule authors can now reason across several different entities within the "scope" of a single rule. This is done using extended forms of the For, Exists and ForAll functions. Each function works like its older equivalent, but the boolean proof for the function is pushed to a subsidiary rule level.
The other new feature is the ability to conclude relationships. Previously, relationships were statically defined for a set of session data. A rule author can now create a new type of relationship, an inferred relationship, and can then infer the source and targets of those relationships using rules.
NOTE: Any V10.0 rulebases that use inferred relationships will need to be recompiled for V10.1.
Reasoning with partial knowledge improves the reasoning done by Oracle Policy Modeling in situations where attributes or relationships used in a rule are unknown. In some of these situations, where not all, but enough information is known it is now possible to receive valid conclusions from a rulebase query. Previously the result of such queries would simply have been unknown.
See also:
In order to provide more fine-grained operations on dates, a date-time attribute type, and a time of day attribute type have been added to Oracle Policy Modeling.
the specified start time for the employee = 07:47:31
the submission date time = 2009-08-12 17:30:00
The use of Microsoft Visio for creating screen flows has been replaced with in-built screen flow functionality. Screen flows are now created and authored entirely within Oracle Policy Modeling.
Oracle Web Determinations 10.0 is able to serve commentary files without extra configuration when the commentary files are included in the deployed rulebase archive. Commentary for screens is now supported in addition to the attribute commentary which was previously supported. Oracle Policy Modeling now creates placeholder commentary files in the rulebase include directory, ready for modification, which will be archived together with the rules and screens each time the rulebase is built. Running Web Determinations in the debugger now shows the commentary as it will appear by default in a production environment.