The XpertRule Rules Authoring Studio

Knowledge Builder is the XpertRule Rules Authoring Studio used to develop, test, deploy and maintain business rules applications. The main value proposition of Knowledge Builder is the speed of development of business rules applications and the associated web user interface. This is a result of 24 years of investment into R & D reacting to graphical development environments, graphical rules representations, building web user interfaces, and high performance deployment architectures.

Based on the experience of many XpertRule developers from large organisations around the world, the typical improvement in application development speed gained from using XpertRule are summarised below:

  • XpertRule - 0.3 hr / function point
  • VB.net - 3.0 hr / function point
  • Java - 9.0 hr / function point

A function point is defined by IBM as a unit of measurement to express the amount of business functionality that an information system provides to a user. It can be seen from above that using XpertRule delivers a minimum development speed improvements of 10 and 30 times over VB.net and Java respectively.

Below are examples of the decision tree / flow representation in XpertRule

Decision Tree Decision Tree

XpertRule also allows rules to be expressed as decision tables which are easy to maintain within XpertRule or can be imported from external databases or spreadsheets.

Decision Tree

Decision / flow Trees in XpertRule Rules Studio can contain "procedures" which are scripting blocks (in VB script or XpertRule script) for calculations, string manipulations and for calling external programs, web services and data sources. Similarly, data capture forms and reports can be embedded in the tree flows. Below is an example of a flow tree with an embedded procedure:

Decision Tree

The Rules authoring environment within XpertRule has a graphical user interface with an object explorer showing the attributes, trees, tables, procedures, forms and other components of the application.

Decision Tree

XpertRule allows the rules author to break-down the rules into a hierarchy of decision trees for ease of development and maintenance. A report displays the overall hierarchy of decision trees and attributes in a "knowledge map" as illustrated in the following map showing a tree "Expenses" which has 3 questions "Hotel", "Grade" and "Department" of which "Hotel" is a sub-tree with 2 questions "Cost" and "In-London".

Decision Tree

The Rules Studio also allows the design of customised user interface Forms for capturing attribute / question data. a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) graphical Screen editor is supported which can be used by business or IT users to define and position what data needs to be captured on each screen. XpertRule can generate highly graphical and interactive browser based user interfaces. For the seasoned web designer, the Rules Studio allows the full control on user interface design through the use of cascading style sheets which can be added to the WYSIWYG or used instead.

Decision Tree