Business Rules vs Decisions

Business Rules

Let’s do a quick recap. This service was originally part of Neo but was then morphed into the SAP Workflow Management service. At one point in time customers use to have to create an MTA app to enable it – this was definitely not great. Eventually though a Booster was created and it allowed customers and partners to get started on Business rules much faster.

Decisions

This is a new function within the new SAP Build Process Automation (SAP BPA) service.

Figure:3 SAP Build Process Automation instance

To create decisions you need to go through the Automations UI and on the launch page it is not really clear how you go about creating a project for Decisions only. I have provided this feedback to SAP as this may be a barrier for customers. There should be an ability to create a project just for Decisions and it should be clear on the initial launch page.

I also want to call out other functionalities I feel are implemented better in Decisions than Business rules.

• As far as the new tooling is concerned there is a major difference when you want to retrieve a table of records. Previously in Business Rules you defined a Table and when this was the result set it meant retrieval of ALL MATCHING records. With the new tooling you simply select the [List] checkbox and this automatically sets the decision to ALL MATCH. In recent updates I also believe users now have the choice to set this, whereas before it was set automatically. This is what it looks like. You can see that this parameter has the List checkbox active meaning multiple records will be returned.

Figure:6 Output parameter List option (to set to ALL MATCH)

• The import and output options are pretty much the same as they were and similar formats for the files.
• Seeing the information around Decision deployment is really good – who created and who modified and the date it was modified are nice additions.

• The overall UI is easier to navigate and follow and good to see both Data types and Decisions are all in the one place. Previously you had to navigate back and forth from Data Types (or open multiple browser windows) to Decisions to other artefacts – a bit annoying and poor UX leading to longer support and maintenance times. Now when you click on the Data types or Decisions they are loaded as tabs in the UI so you can quickly navigate to what you want to look at. Really handy.

Figure:8 Decisions artifacts – you can see Data types and Decisions on one page

You can see here the tabs view making it faster and easier to navigate to different artifacts without multiple browser sessions.

Figure:9 Decisions artifacts tabular view

• Retrieving the ID’s that need to be used in the API call are a bit difficult to find. In Business Rules you had to include the ID field using the Settings cog to be able to retrieve the Rule service ID. In Decisions, you use the 3 dots icon in the top right hand corner of the Decisions UI and then click [View Details].

  Figure:10 Decision ID for the API call

Figure:11 Decisions ID and Version

At the moment the Version is required in the API call but in future releases I believe this is being removed.

So overall I must say that I believe the new Decisions sub-service is better than the previous Business Rules service (as part of Workflow Management). The next items I need to work through include migration of existing Business Rules projects to Decisions as I have not tried this as yet. I did run an internal Dev session a few weeks ago on Decisions and the team were really excited by the new UI and the ease with which they can now include Decisions into app development.

A big thankyou to Archana Shukla and the extended team for being patient and spending the time to go through the new Decisions functions. Really appreciate it.

Look out for a future blog post on how Decisions can be used to build an application with the ultimate flexibility. 🙂

Thanks for reading, feel free to leave a comment about your experiences!