Refactor Your Rule Assets with Corticon 5.7

Keeping up with Vocabulary entities, attributes and association names can be a challenge when business requirements and rules change. Now you can Refactor once and apply the change everywhere.

Business requirements change every day. Whether you're in a regulation-intensive industry, or simply a company with many internal decision dependencies, keeping up with changes can be time-intensive and inefficient. Have you ever had to change names for entities to better reveal its purpose or rename business objects as requirements change? How about struggled to find object references to make the edits, and then save them to be sure product functionality does not break?

If so, you will be very excited to learn that Progress Corticon 5.7 has introduced Vocabulary Refactoring, a new feature that gives you the ability to refactor a Vocabulary entity, attribute, or association name so that each change is automatically applied everywhere in the project.

The Problem—Business Solutions are Complex

Imagine having a Business Rules Decision Service solution containing two entities with two attributes each and a single association between them with one business rule operating upon them. Now, if you were to change the name of an entity, an attribute or the association, you would need to make the change in the Vocabulary and that one rule. This can be easily achieved by manually making the changes and saving your rule assets.

But let’s think. Are business solutions so simple that we can achieve everything with just one business rule? No. In reality, a business rules decision service contains a large number of entities and attributes with multiple associations between them―anywhere from tens to thousands of rules. It is not feasible to make these changes manually on such a large scale.

Consider the amount of effort and time you would spend doing the changes manually. You would need to review each rulesheet and ensure that each reference is modified and saved. Do you think you would be able to spot all the references across all the rule assets? What about the validity of the rules when making the modifications? There will be a time where the project will be in an invalid state until all the changes are complete. What would happen if you are in the middle of making the changes and you need to redo them? What would happen to project schedules? Would deadlines be met?

The Solution—Vocabulary Refactoring

The Vocabulary Refactoring feature helps you both save time and effort and maintain project schedules.

Although Refactoring will update the rule assets and save them, this cannot be undone, so we recommend that you take a backup of the assets before refactoring the Vocabulary. Refactoring on a large project might take a minute or more, so it is important that you let the refactoring process finish, as cancelling it midway will leave rule assets in an invalid state. This feature does have restrictions documented in the Quick Reference Guide. If there are errors, they are highlighted in the Problems View and an alert is given so you can manually make the changes. For more information about this feature, see "Refactoring entity, attribute, or association names in a project" in the Quick Reference Guide.

Save Time with Corticon 5.7

In summary, with Vocabulary Refactoring in Corticon 5.7, business rule modelers can now rename vocabulary elements and automatically update all references in the rule assets. This makes it much easier to make changes to the names of the Vocabulary elements without breaking any existing rule functionalities. To use this new feature, all you need to do is highlight the Vocabulary elements, right-click and choose “Refactor” in the context menu (or select it from the menu under Vocabulary>Refactor).

Whether you’re on-boarding new customers, processing claims, determining product configurations, or assessing program eligibility, Corticon 5.7 helps you to more efficiently manage critical business decisions. See what’s new or schedule a demo today.