Policy rules and conditional expressions

Before you work with policies, it is important to understand the principles of policy rules and how conditional expressions in the rules for a particular type of portal resource can be applied and managed. These principles are fundamental to understanding the hierarchy of policies and how inheritance works between parent and child policies. You will also want to know how policies for portal resources use the Personalization Editor, particularly the correlation of policy concepts and Personalization concepts.


Policy types, rules, and conditions

A policy type is the main collection of settings that is applied to a particular portal resource, for example, Mail. The main policy for a particular portal resource is the root policy at the top level of the policy hierarchy; it has no parent policies but can have one or more levels of child policies. Child policies provide the specialized policy settings for the resource. If there are no child policies for the resource, the main policy provides the settings for the resource.

A policy rule is a set of conditional statements that enables a resource to be evaluated so that specified actions can be applied to the resource automatically. For example, the Mail policy might have a Geography rule that governs how the Mail portlet behaves for one or more locales.

A policy condition is a circumstance or state of a managed portal resource that is examined during policy rule evaluation. A condition is an expression in a policy rule that can be evaluated to either true or false or that specifies the state of the target object with regard to the enforcement of the policy to the object. The conditions of the rule belonging to the parent policy are available for selection when you create child policies. One condition of the parent policy rule is associated with a child policy.


Examples of policy conditions

For example, the Geography rule belonging to the Mail policy might have one or more conditional expressions, each of which is presented as a named condition: Americas, Europe, Middle East, Asia-Pacific.

Here is how the Mail policy Geography rule would express these conditions: 

Mail GeographyRule is
Americas when 
current User.Geography is included in North America, South America
Europe when
current User.Geography is equal to Europe
Middle East when
current User.Geography is equal to Middle East
Asia-Pacific when
current User.Geography is equal to Asia-Pacific


Child policies

A refinement of the Mail policy might include one or more child policies that apply a particular condition of the Geography rule, for example, American Mail Locales and European Mail Locales. Each child policy is a refinement of a rule belonging to the parent policy. If a rule is not associated with the parent policy, there can be no child policies. These child policies might apply another policy rule, User Level, to govern how the Mail portlet behaves for one or more levels of users within a locale. The expressions for evaluating User Level are presented as named conditions, for example, Executive, Manager, Assistant, Staff, and Contractor.

Given these examples, the hierarchy of the Mail policy might include the following child policies, which inherit the rules and conditions of the parent policy:

Each child policy can be refined further by one or more levels of additional child policies. In this way, policies for portal resources are specialized according to the policy rules and conditions that are applied for the resource type.


Policy rules use Personalization

Resource policies are integrated with Personalization. The Policy Manager uses the Personalization runtime server, specifically the Personalization rules engine, for evaluating and processing policy rules. Personalization specializes portal content for various classes of users: creating profiles of users, determining which pages and portlets are visible to a user, and selecting Web content and documents based on characteristics of the user. As business rules that use the Personalization rules engine, policy rules are available for viewing, selection, creation, and editing in the Personalization Editor. When you work with policy rules and conditions, you automatically move out of the Resource Policies portlets and into the Personalization Editor.

Because Personalization is used in many contexts throughout the portal, Personalization rules are not specific to policies. You may use the same Personalization rules for policies, Web content, and page layout. Note how policy concepts correspond to Personalization concepts:


Parent

Work with child policies

 


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