Use Business Rules With Your Rule Sets

After you create a rule set for a dynamic table or form, you can use business rules to change the value of specific field properties, across multiple dynamic form and tables, when the rule's conditions are met.

When you create a dynamic form or table, a rule set is created automatically, and by default the fields in the rule set's default layout are included in business rules. When a field is included in business rules, you can override some of its properties using rules and conditions. It is up to you if you want to use business rules to override field properties. You can choose to use rule sets or business rules, or use both. You can also choose to exclude rule set layouts from business rules.

Compared to layouts in rule sets, business rules don't provide the fine grain control over all the details of a form or table layout, but they do allow you to quickly create rules that can override some field properties. Like rule sets, the overrides in business rules are applied at runtime, but they take precedence over field properties defined in rule set layouts. For more details, see What Are Business Rules?

Note:

Like rule sets, business rules cannot override properties set in the Layout's Fields tab.

Let's take a look at an example of what happens when the fields in a rule set are included in business rules. When you create a form to display an object's fields (the leadCompetitors object, in this example), the default layout for the form's rule set might look something like this:

Description of the illustration businessrules-appui-newruleset.png

When you switch to the Business Rules tab for leadCompetitors, the four fields in the default layout are displayed in the list. The "Show only fields used by layouts" filter is selected, so only the four fields are shown:

Description of the illustration businessrules-appui-fields.png

If you create another form, with a different rule set, or modify the default layout to add more fields, the list of fields is updated to include the new fields. In this example, two more fields (Last Update Date and Threat Level Code), added in the new form, are now included in the list:

Description of the illustration businessrules-appui-addfields.png

You could now write one business rule that would affect both forms, for example, to hide a field, even though the forms use different rule sets.