IBM BPM, V8.0.1, All platforms > Authoring services in Integration Designer > Developing business processes > Create business rules
When to use business rules
A business rule is anything that captures and implements business policies and practices. A rule can enforce business policy, make a decision, or infer new data from existing data.
The IBM Integration Designer tools have been designed so that users can easily compose integrative business solutions without programming skills. To this end, you can easily create and develop business rules in an intuitive graphical programming environment.
In general, you should use business rules to make a decision when any of the following conditions are met:
- you want to change the results at run time, on a running server instead of hard-coded logic in your solution.
- the decision itself naturally takes on the form of a table
- the decision itself naturally takes on the form of a series of textual if-then statements.
If you want to modify the business rule dynamically you must base your rule on a template. Basing rules on templates gives you more dynamicity at run time and allows you to modify settings without involving an integration developer.
If your decision logic analyzes a collection of data or loops over a set of data, you should probably structure the decision in a sequential process, and call out to a rule set whenever there is configurable data.