Overview

ILOG® JRules Business Rules Management System (BRMS) allows customers to externalize complex business rules from applications. With the ILOG JRules stage, you can invoke complex business rules within the context of a job.

The stage provides DataStage® parallel jobs with access to the ILOG JRules engine. The JRules engine can be used to perform complex data transformations on the records in the job.

If the connector is configured to access JRules in core engine mode, it invokes the rulesets that reside in the ruleset archive files on the IBM® InfoSphere® Information Server engine host. If the connector is configured to access JRules in locally managed (J Platform, Standard Editon) or remotely managed (Java™ Platform, Enterprise Edition) mode, it invokes the rulesets that are persisted in the ruleset repository.

ILOG JRules connector consists of a design time component and a runtime component.

The design time component consists of the stage editor that collects inputs from the user. It also consists of the configuration wizard that is used to configure the stage properties and link schema definitions of the connector based on the parameter definitions of the specified ruleset.

The runtime component of the connector is responsible for invoking the rulesets within the context of the DataStage job. ILOG JRules accepts input data in the form of Java objects and the output data returned by ILOG JRules also consists of Java objects. The basic functionality of the runtime component is to read the input DataStage records sent by the upstream stage and convert them into Java objects. It then invokes the ruleset by using the instantiated Java objects and converts the Java objects returned by the ruleset back into DataStage records. These records are then sent to the downstream stage. Consequently, the ILOG JRules stage can operate only in the request/reply mode, which further means that it must be positioned in the job as a midstream stage and not the first or the last stage. It is similar, for example, to the use of the Transformer stage.