RE: (ROSE) any better way to deal with business rules

[Walter Howard]

If you think about building an application and database for an inventory application, you'll find yourself in a predicament fairly quickly.  The inventory items keep changing, new items are added, old ones are deleted, etc.  If you used a non meta-model approach, you would constantly be adding new tables and columns to the database to define the new products or remove the old products.  Additionally, the application must constantly be updated to use the new inventory.  To avoid this problem, you can have a meta-model database that defines what the inventory is.  For example, let's say you want to add a new designer shirt from Tommy Hilfiger.  You would first define the properties of the shirt, its size, color, manufacturer, cost.  Whatever the item, you can define a parameter for that attribute.  Once you define all of the parameters, then you add (Insert) the values for those parameters in the database.  Now the database holds the "definition" and the values for your inventory items.    As far as OCL is concerned, I can't help you there.  I've seen this approach work for OO and relational databases using Smalltalk and Java respectively.   HTH, Walter >>> "Yakov, Debby" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 03/02/01 11:15AM >>> Walter, or anyone else out there, can you elaborate on this "metamodel"?  What you've said here sounds very much like what I'm going to try to do in the next phase of my project, in terms of letting users define parameters for a system on the fly and then generating a system that executes under those parameters (say, stored in a config file). Change the parameters and the system runs under a different "policy".    I'm a bit vague on OCL, and you didn't address it in your response. Would OCL help here? Is there an OCL parser that can be invoked from the REI to help an Add-In capture the OCL created by the user?   Thanks -- Debby -----Original Message----- From: Walter Howard [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2001 2:48 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: (ROSE) any better way to deal with business rules Instead of trying to model a dynamic environment with static structures, you could create a meta-model where the business rules could be defined on the fly by the users.  The rules entered by the users would then define the functionality of the application.  This works great for inventory and telecom plan types applications. Walter >>> Ma Ding-CDM087 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 02/28/01 09:34AM >>> We are in the process of building a model for a large scale telecom system. I wonder if anyone has any experience on how to model the business rules, like FCC regulations and  network device/protocol compatibility checking. We also hope to use OCL to specify these rules in use case diagrams or class disgrams, and be able to generate Java/XML code to enforce them. Suggestions will be much appreciated. Ding ************************************************************************ * Rose Forum is a public venue for ideas and discussions. * For technical support, visit http://www.rational.com/support * * Admin.Subscription Requests: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Archive of messages: http://www.rational.com/products/rose/usergroups/rose_forum.jtmpl * Other Requests: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * * To unsubscribe from the list, please send email * * To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Subject:<BLANK> * Body: unsubscribe rose_forum * *************************************************************************