Policy rules

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. You will also want to know how policies for portal resources use the WebSphere Portal Personalization Navigator, Personalization Editor, and the Personalization rules engine, particularly the correlation of concepts and terminology.

Policies for portal resources are rules-based settings that determine how the target object functions in variable contexts and for different classes of users.

• Each policy has a rule associated with it.

• Each policy rule contains at least one conditional expression.

Policy rules

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 in the portal behaves for one or more locales.

Policy conditions

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 application 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. The condition for each child policy must be fulfilled when the rule of the parent policy is applied.

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

Policy rules use Personalization

When you work with policy rules and conditions, you use the Personalization Navigator and the Personalization Editor for business rules.

• When create a policy rule, you automatically move from Resource Policies to the Personalization Editor.

• When select a policy rule, you automatically move from Resource Policies to the Personalization Navigator.

Personalization supports business rules, including policy rules, that are common to many contexts. You may use any of the business rules that are available in Personalization for policies, Web content, and page layout. Note how policy concepts correspond to Personalization concepts:

• In the Personalization portlets, a policy rule is also known as a profiler.

• In the Personalization portlets, a policy condition is also known as a profile.

Parent topic:

Manage portal resources with policies

Related tasks

Work with policy rules

Related reference

Policy settings for mail
Policy settings for composite applications
Policy cache properties
Sample Policy XML configuration files

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