Manage rulebases

What do you want to do?

Manage multiple rulebases

Oracle Web Determinations is capable of serving multiple rulebases through the same instance of Web Determinations, meaning that it is necessary to configure the look and feel and the extension just once, after which they will automatically be applied to each rulebase.

To do this, simply deploy each rulebase zip file to the location specified in the configuration file and start the application. When you open a web browser, the default page of your Web Determinations deployment will display the list of rulebases that have just been deployed.

Hot-swap rulebases

Instead of taking the application offline to deploy rulebase changes, you can use hot swapping to deploy updated rulebases. This requires the following parameters in the configuration file (application.properties) to be set as follows:

load.rulebase.as.resource = false
rulebase.path = /WEB-INF/classes/rulebases
cache.loaded.rulebases = false

 

Note: The rulebase path may not work correctly if the path is relative to the file system rather than relative to the application root (such as on WebLogic on Linux). In this case, the leading "/" should be removed.

 

To test this, do the following:

  1. Start up the application and pick one of the deployed rulebases; perform a simple investigation.
  2. Open the same project in Oracle Policy Modeling and make a few changes to the layout of the summary screen.
  3. Recompile.
  4. Copy the recompiled rulebase zip file to the rulebase directory of the still running Web Determinations deployment, overwriting the existing zip of that rulebase.
  5. Start a new investigation on that same rulebase.
  6. Pull up the summary screen; you will now see the changes that were just made.

 

Rulebase hot-swapping on .NET

By default, rulebases are set up to be deployed to the 'bin/rulebases' directory of the web application. However, adding, deleting or modifying the files contained in this directory can lead to issues due to the way that ASP .NET recycles application domains. In short, changing the contents of a virtual directory at runtime may cause ASP .NET reload the whole application which will have the effect of destroying any active interview sessions. Therefore, if you are intending to use the rulebase hot-swapping feature, it is strongly advised that you change the location of your rulebase directory to one that is located outside the application's virtual directory. This can be done by:

  1. Creating a directory located outside the application's virtual directory.
  2. Setting the permissions on this directory to enable it to be read by the application. Generally this involves granting read permissions to the ASPNET user.
  3. Changing the 'rulebase.path' property in the 'application.properties' file to the absolute path of the directory created in step 1