How do I write a business rule?

A business rule is a short program that performs a business task. Business rules are at the heart of Planning Business Modeler. You can create business rules that allocate resources, calculate forecasts according to your criteria, determine variances, or find key performance indicators. Rules can help you run queries, seed data in Microsoft Office Excel forms, or move balances from one period to another. Rules can be run directly from the Business Rules workspace or run as part of a scheduled job.

This topic discusses the high-level steps for creating a rule.

Additional important information

Business rules often depend on specific dimension structures in a model or on particular model properties. Be sure to check the documentation for the specific type of rule you will be writing.

Prerequisites

Before writing a rule, do the following:

• Make sure that you have Modeler permissions.

• Deploy the model site if you have not already done this; otherwise, the rule will not validate.

Writing a business rule

Use the steps in the following table to track your progress.

Step	Task	Related topic
1.	From a Business Rules workspace, select the applicable rule set to contain your new rule. If no existing rule set is appropriate, you can create a new rule set	Analyze rule choices
2.	Identify the implementation factors that are important for your rule.	Specify the implementation type
3.	Decide how you want to create the rule. For a rule that is based on a predefined rule template, you can replace the placeholders with the applicable values. For a rule without a template, define the rule type and implementation for the rule in the Create New Rule dialog box. Then type the code for the rule in the expression pane by using PerformancePoint Expression Language (PEL). For a rule that is based on an existing rule, copy the rule, and then modify its content in the expression pane.	Review methods for creating a rule
4.	In the Business Rules workspace, create the rule.	Creating a new rule
5.	Specify the scope of the rule. If you are not using a template, click Insert Member(s) of Dimension, and then select the name of the dimension for which you want to add members If you are using a template, open the Fill Template Placeholders dialog box to select values for template placeholders.	Inserting a member of a dimension in a rule - or - Filling a placeholder in a rule template
6.	If you are writing the rule in PEL, write the rule text in the Rule Expressions pane. Otherwise, continue to step 7.	Review formats for business rules in PEL
7.	Validate the rule, and fix any parsing and semantic errors that occur.	Validating a rule, rule set, or all rules
8.	Save your new rule by saving the model.	See "Save work in progress" in the product help.
9.	Deploy the rule to make it available for use.	Deploying rules and variables
10.	In the Business Rules workspace, run the rule to test it.	Executing a rule set or rule

Next steps

After your new rule runs without error, you can include your new rule to run in a job. For information about jobs, see "Workflow and process scheduling in Planning Business Modeler" in the product help.

See Also

Other Resources

About business rules