There are several ways in which you can polish your rulebase for deployment. Here are some ideas and suggestions with links to the relevant topics.
Add default values and validate user input
Customize Oracle Web Determinations
Name substitution personalizes the interview for a more user-friendly experience. You can collect a person's name at the start of an interview, and then the name will be automatically substituted in later questions, in decision reports and on the summary screen. For more information see:
Gender pronoun substitution can be used in combination with name substitution (or in isolation) to provide more natural language text. For example, "the student avoided handing in the student's assignment" becomes (in combination with name substitution) "Matthew avoided handing in his assignment". For more information see:
Variable values such as the person's name and/or age can be substituted into screen names and labels. For example, you could have a screen name appear as "School Details – Bart, aged 10 years". For more information see:
Sentences and questions can be generated in second person rather than in third person in order to personalize the interview. For example, instead of "Does the applicant have health insurance?" the question is asked as "Do you have health insurance?". For more information see:
Labels can be added to question screens and the summary screen to provide context. They can also be used as additional headings. Labels can include static text, as well as HTML. For more information see:
Using visibility attributes, you can control whether screen elements are displayed or hidden at various stages of the interview based on logic. For example, you might want to display a goal to investigate at the start of the interview, but then hide it at the end. For more information see:
You can set default values for any attribute on a question screen. Defaults can be a specific value, or can be dynamically determined based on data collected on previous screens. Providing defaults reduces the amount of typing/clicking required to complete an interview. For more information see:
You can validate the input that a user enters to warn or prevent them from entering values which do not meet certain criteria when running the rulebase. Specific errors and warnings can be triggered by conditional logic in rules. For example, you could display the message "Please check the dates of birth as you have indicated that your date of birth is after your child's date of birth" if the applicant’s date of birth > the child’s date of birth. Defining maximum and minimum values, or using regular expressions, for an attribute are other ways to fire generic error messages when the input value falls outside the specified range or does not meet a specified format (eg an email address). For more information see:
Decision reports can be improved by ensuring that structural elements in legislation (eg section, paragraph, article, etc.) and policy (eg chapter, guideline, etc.) are included. Oracle Policy Modeling can automatically generate these structural attributes. The default form is "section x is satisfied", but this can be configured. For more information see:
Adding intermediate attributes to your rules can make decision reports more meaningful. For example, adding "the person satisfies the income test" as an intermediate attribute in between "the person is eligible for the benefit" and "the person's income < 3000" in the following rule results in a more useful decision report.
the person is eligible for the benefit if
the person satisfies the income test
the person's income < 3000
For more information see:
Decision reports automatically generated based on logic can be extremely verbose in terms of language and the structure of the rules. You can 'trim' decision reports using the silent and invisible parameters making them much easier to follow ("silent" hides all the logic nested below the attribute, "invisible" hides the attribute only and can be applied locally or globally). For more information see:
The Data Review screen in Oracle Web Determinations displays the questions asked during the interview and the answers provided. Question screens on the Data Review screen are listed in the order defined in the Screen Order in the screens file. If no Screen Order is defined in the screens file, the screens will appear in a random order in the default Data Review screen in Web Determinations, which is not very user-friendly. It is therefore recommended that you either define a Screen Order or, if necessary, a different Data Review screen. For more information see:
Stages can be displayed at the top of interview screens (with the current stage/screen shown in bold) to show the user their progress through the interview. Progress stages are turned on by default if a Screen Order has been defined. For more information see:
Standard out-of-the-box Web Determinations label text, such as Yes, No, Submit, Load etc, can be modified in the messages.<locale>.properties file for the project. For more information see:
The Oracle Web Determinations banner, which by default is the Oracle logo and the text "Web Determinations", can be replaced with any other image and/or text (eg your application's logo and name). For more information see:
Commentary (context-sensitive help text) can be provided to help users understand the questions that they are being asked and the screens they are being presented. For more information see: