Using XSLT to Process Business Rules?
One of my coworkers said that one use of XSLT is for processing business rules. He mentioned that there are systems that allow users to write business rules in some kind of text format, and then the program uses XSLT to process the text and apply the rules at runtime in the application.
Can someone shed some light on this topic for me?
Thank!
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I believe your colleague referred to BPEL, Business Process Execution Language . BPEL is an XML-based executable language for describing business processes.
As an XML format, business rules can be generated or transformed using XSLT. However, I'm not familiar with BPEL, so I don't know which system is doing something like this.
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Uch. I would not recommend this.
As the first responder said, XSL-T is for XML transformation. This is not a rule mechanism. I think this sounds like a misuse of technology.
XSL-T transformations are not intuitive to write. If one of your goals for business rules is allowing business people to update and maintain rules, I can't imagine a dumber and more complex technology to do this than XSL-T.
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Yes. A somewhat text-based format is called Excel, and users tend to do all sorts of complex things with it. The programmer then spends a lot of time trying to handle it with every shiny new technology he can find, including XSLT, and finally decides to manually code any inconsistencies. It is not fully automated as no sane user would trust a programmer to get it the first time.
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XSLT stands for XSL Transform. It is used to change an XML document from one form to another.
On the systems side, Microsoft BizTalk uses XSLT in display operations that map one XML document to another. In XSLT, the user can use .net code to perform more complex processing.
I'm sure someone else will have a nicer explanation, but you can easily learn more from the Googling XSLT tutorials. This is a huge topic.
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It should be possible: write your rules in XML, the case data should also be in XML, and then you can write a generic XSLT that compares the case data with the rules and executes the corresponding rules in the correct sequence.
Business users don't need to know XSLT, they just need to know how to write rules.