The OpenLexicon Wizard is a tool that creates, maintains and implements business rules or ‘rulesets’. The wizard breaks your use case into validation rules, transformation rules and process lists. Because all elements in OpenLexicon are loaded into memory, there is no code to compile. OpenLexicon is very agile with changes to business rules and process logic.

Our Getting Started Section and code samples best describe OpenLexicon’s methodology, however; a short introduction is appropriate here.

OpenLexicon business rules are carried out sequentially in either validations, transformations or process lists. A validation is a sequence of logic that evaluates to true or false. You use validations to determine if a condition, such as the correctness of a transaction, has been met. A transformation computes and assigns values to data in your use case. For instance, you might use a transformation to look up some data for a customer or a contract. The business rules part of the validation and transformation is in enforcing corporate policies and governance. If you have personnel policies, then you can use OpenLexicon to enforce these with validations and transformations. A personnel policy might require a graduate degree and five or more years of experience for a particular position. OpenLexicon can enforce these policies as a validation.

A process list can model different branches of a procedure to create a complete process scenario.

Data elements are modeled as parameters in OpenLexicon. The OpenLexicon parameter is a very powerful object. As you detail the characteristics of the parameter, OpenLexicon will automatically enforce the details. For instance, the length, upper/lower case and even value lists will automatically be part of the validation of the parameter.

As you build your business rules you will construct collections of business rules and data elements (parameters) as business objects. A business object is a high-level entity concept such as an employee, contract, or insurance policy. Each business object can hold numerous rulesets or process lists. There is no need to create multiple employee business object to enforce multiple policies, you simply create another rule list. Naturally, you can reuse a business rule in one of these lists. OpenLexicon allows you to order the validation or transformation to match your logic.

This documentation has not been designed to describe every field on the screens of the OpenLexicon wizard. Most of these are self explanatory. In these sections, each of the important subject areas of the OpenLexicon is described in detail.

You should note the following commonality:

1. Name The OpenLexicon object (parameter, business rule, business object) has a name that is the tag to reference the object in the meta-date and subsequently in the Java Program or web service that runs the business rule.
2. Description A description of the object, this is documentation for the analysts.
3. Prompt When screens are generated, the prompt is the field in front of the text widget.
4. Label the label is used on reports. It is not currently implemented.