Classify Rules as belonging to other Rules

See Also

You can classify a Business Rule as belonging to (being a child rule of) another Business Rule, the parent rule. To do this, set the Belongs To attribute of the child rule to the ID of the parent rule.

There are a number of reasons why you might want to do this.

Sometimes a cluster of rules exists around a special theme. In this case the parent rule might be a definition and the child rules may express the more specific rules that apply to that term, concept or definition. Thus a parent rule in car rental outlets might be the definition: "WALK-IN RESERVATION is the process of renting cars to clients who contact a pick-up branch, pay and rent a car, and pick up the car from that same branch all within the same day." A child rule might be: "The Pick Up Date and Agreement Date of a walk-in reservation are the same date."

Another example is the rule "Changes made to combinations of roof elements and maintenance activities can be traced". At a later stage, it emerges that this type of data manipulation is performed by a particular user group, while the tracing is done by another particular group. It may be helpful to formulate these two authorization requirements as separate new business rules, and append the two rules as child rules to the original rule.

Other times, you might want to keep a rule that was stated and approved by the customer as is, but implement it in stages. Keep the customer's rule as the parent rule but split it up in a number of child rules and implement those child rules separately. At a later stage, by a single SQL statement in USoft Definer's SQL Command interface, you can set the Built flag of all parent rules to Yes that have Requires Implementation set to Yes and do not have child rules that still have Built set to No.

A Business Rule cannot belong to itself.

Child Business Rules must have the same Business Object and Business Area as their parent. However, they may be a member of a different Rule Set than their parent.