What's New in Oracle Policy Automation V10

Version 10.2

Oracle Determinations Server

The Determinations Server has been completely rewritten to follow a new architecture. This allows the existing functionality provided by the Determinations Server to be extended. It also allows custom services to be written and installed in the Determinations Server.

New WSDL for Assess Service

There is a new version of the WSDL for assess requests and responses. Assess requests and responses now have a hierarchical structure that follows the hierarchical data model provided by Entity Containment. Full backwards compatibility is provided for WSDL used in OPA 10.0 and 10.1.

Interview Service

Version 10.2.0 also includes a new Interview Service. The Interview Service is a web service that can be used by custom applications that conduct interviews. It is provided as an alternative to using the Interview Engine Java or .NET APIs directly.

Version 10.1

Oracle Determinations Engine

The Oracle Determinations Engine has been enhanced with new data types and reasoning features. These features are available throughout the product suite from Oracle Policy Modeling to Oracle Determinations Server and Oracle Web Determinations.

Prevent custom functions making session data changes

It was previously possible (but officially discouraged) to change the session inside a custom function handler or in an inferencing listener after a rulebase event is raised.  Since this can cause instability in the engine (at worst) or inconsistent behaviour (at best), this is now explicitly prevented and an error occurs if the custom function handler or inferencing listener attempt to make direct changes to the session in the middle of an inferencing cycle.

Inferencing Listener enhancements

Inferencing listeners are allowed to make changes before or after an inferencing cycle, and this is the recommended alternative.  If an inferencing listener needs to make changes in response to a rulebase event, it should set some internal flag and wait until the end of the inferencing cycle to make those changes.  The engine will automatically trigger another inferencing cycle if those changes cause other rules to trigger.

See also:

Customize the inferencing cycle with custom functions and inferencing listeners

Rulebase Configuration File

Oracle Web Determinations

Oracle Web Determinations has been completely re-architected, and provides improved extensibility, embedability, international support and configurability.

Entity Containment

In Oracle Policy Automation V10.0 the concept of an entity being collected was introduced. When an entity is considered collected, the rule engine assumes that it knows the entire set of instances for that entity.

An entity's collection status (whether or not it is considered collected) is of major importance when determining whether or not a relationship is partially known (Partially known relationships).

Under Oracle Policy Automation 10.0 the user was able to directly set the collection status of an entity. However in Oracle Policy Automation 10.1 the collection status of an entity is now determined by the engine through the use of containment relationships. A containment relationship is a one-to-many relationship from a parent entity to a child entity. An entity Y is considered to be collected if:

  1. A one-to-many containment relationship is defined from some other entity X to entity Y (i.e. Y is contained by X) and this is referred to as the entity Y's containment relationship
  2. Entity Y's containment relationship is set (i.e. it is known) for all instances of entity X
  3. Entity X is also considered to be collected.

 

Note:

Rulebase Service Plug-in

An Oracle Web Determinations implementation can now handle more than one rulebase. When there are two or more rulebases, the user is given the choice to select which rulebase to run. Therefore, an Oracle Web Determinations implementation can now list the available rulebases that the user can access, and  retrieve a specific rulebase when the user selects one to run. These and other internal rulebase functions are provided by a 'Rulebase Service' object in the Oracle Web Determinations.

The default Oracle Web Determinations Rulebase Service retrieves rulebases as zip files from a pre-defined location/path in the Oracle Web Determinations webapp; for example, for a default installation, the path <OWD webapp>/WEB-INF/classes/rulebases, is read and monitored for rulebases. The user can store/manage the rulebase zip files in the path, and also access them to list or load a specific rulebase.

There are situations where rulebases of an Oracle Web Determinations implementation need to be stored and accessed from a custom datasource. The Rulebase Service Plugin is an Interview Engine plugin that allows usage of custom datasources to store and retrieve rulebases from. Also it allows the implementer to customize the rulebase service functionality.

See also:

Create a Rulebase Service

Extensions - Rulebase Service Plug-in Sample Code (DerbyRulebaseService)

Localization

The default Oracle Web Determinations user interface is now provided in every one of the 24 languages for which a syntactic or non-syntactic parser is available.

 

Version 10.0

Change the appearance of a web interview

Change the behavior of a web interview control

Save web interview results

Customize resource loading for Web Determinations

Add user authentication to Web Determinations

 

 

For this release of the Developer Help, it may help to be aware of the following product mapping between the Oracle naming and the former Haley naming:

 

Current Oracle Naming Former Haley Naming
Oracle Policy Automation Haley Office Rules product suite
Oracle Policy Modeling Haley Office Rules
Oracle Policy Automation Haley Determination Services
Oracle Determinations Server Haley Determinations Server
Oracle Determinations Engine Haley Determinations Engine
Oracle Web Determinations Haley Interactive