A coworker of mine mentioned that one use of XSLT is processing business rules. He mentioned that there were systems that allowed 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 run-time in the application.
Can someone shed some light on this subject for me?
Thanks!
XSLT stands for XSL Transform. It is used to change an XML document from one form to another.
As for systems, Microsoft BizTalk uses XSLT in mapping operations that map one XML document into another. Within the XSLT the user can make use of .net code to do more complex processing.
I'm sure someone else will have a much nicer explanation but you can easily find out more by Googling XSLT tutorials. It's a huge topic.
Ouch. I wouldn't recommend that.
As the first responder said, XSL-T is for transforming XML. It's not a rules engine. I think it sounds like a misuse of the technology.
XSL-T transforms are not intuitive to write. If one of your goals for business rules is allowing business folks to update and maintain the rules, I can't imagine a more obtuse and difficult technology for doing so than XSL-T.
I suppose your colleague was refering to BPEL, the Business Process Execution Language. BPEL is an XML-based executable language for describing business processes.
Being an XML format, business rules may be generated or transformed using XSLT. However, I'm not familiar with BPEL so I don't know any system doing something like that.
Yes. The somewhat-like text format is called Excel, and users tend to do all kinds of complex things with it. The programmer then spends an awful lot of time trying to process it with every shiny new technology he can find, including XSLT, and finally decides to hand-code around all the inconsistencies. It is not fully automated, as no sane user trusts the programmer to get it right first time.
It should be possible: write your rules in XML, the case data should also be in XML, and then a generic XSLT could be written that compares the case data against the rules and executes the relevant rules in the correct sequence.
The business users don't need to know XSLT, they just need to know how to write the rules.