Managing Business Rules with Toolbar

The purpose of the Toolbar is to give rule authors an easy to use UI that provides basic rule management functionality such as creating, editing, and deleting rules. It also can be used to select (load) an existing rule, and name and describe new or existing rules.

The Toolbar does not actually store your rules anywhere, nor does it delete or update them in their physical location. Instead, it simply provides you, the developer, with the rule's data every time a rule author wants to work with that rule. When receiving that data, you have to decide where to store that rule, or where to load it from, or whether this particular rule author has the right to do anything with that rule at all.

The Toolbar can be removed from Rule Editor's UI by setting the RuleEditor.ShowToolBar property to False. It is shown by default. You have to implement your own controls, such as Save and Load buttons, and "connect" those controls with the server-side code if you hide the Toolbar but still need to manage rules. The ASP.NET 4.6 Linq Data Filtering demo project uses this scenario.

If shown, the Toolbar always appears on top of the Rule Area. It consists of several UI elements:

• Rules menu. This menu provides options to create new rules and load existing ones, if there are any. The number of options to create new rules and labels of those options depends on the Mode property of the RuleEditor class. If the Mode is set to RuleType.Execution, the Toolbar will include two options - New execution type rule... and New evaluation type rule.... Selecting one of those options will clear the Rule Area for the new rule of the selected type. If the Mode is set to RuleType.Evaluation or RuleType.Loop, the Toolbar will include only one option named New rule.... Selecting that option will clear the Rule Area for a new rule of evaluation type in Evaluation mode or execution type in Loop mode. As you can see, it is important to understand Rule Editor's modes and how they operate. You can easily change the labels of all these menu options to your own values by employing the Help XML.

  

  You can also include options in this menu to load existing rules for editing. It is entirely up to you, the developer, to decide which rules to load in this menu, as long as they correlate with the current value of the RuleEditor.Mode. You can load any type of rule if the Mode is set to RuleType.Execution. But Rule Editor may not work properly if you load any execution type rule into the Rules menu while the Mode is set to RuleType.Evaluation (its default value). Most of our demo projects demonstrate the use of Tootlbar and how to load rules into its Rules menu.

  RuleEditor.ToolBarRules is the property that you need to populate for rules to appear in the Rules menu on the client. It's of the ICollection<MenuItem> type.

• Name text box. Rule authors can name rules by typing the rule name into the Name text box. The name is stored in Rule XML. By default it's a required field unless the Toolbar is hidden. Set RuleEditor.RuleNameIsRequired to False to make this field optional. The default "empty" label of the box can easily be changed with the Help XML.

  

• Description text box. Rule authors can also give rules short descriptions by typing them into the Description box. This field is optional. The Rule Editor displays rule descriptions in the Help String when rule authors move through the list of existing rules in the Rules menu with the mouse or keyboard. The rule editor also shows descriptions of reusable rules when a rule author hovers the mouse over the rule in the Rule Area. The default "empty" label of the box can easily be changed with the Help XML.

  

• Save button. The Save button allows rule authors to notify the server code that the current rule needs to be saved. Rule Editor does not actually save the rule for you since it has no knowledge of the infrastructure or systems involved in your rule processing. Instead, it just passes the rule data to the server and makes it available to your code as a compact string-based XML document, together with some other useful data. It's up to you how to handle that data.

  

• Delete button. The Delete button notifies your server code that the rule author wants to delete the currently loaded rule. As with every other piece of Toolbar's functionality, Rule Editor does not (and cannot) actually delete your rules. Instead, it lets your code know which rule the user wants to delete. This button is only visible on the Toolbar when a previously saved rule is loaded into the Rule Area.

  

Please refer to our demo projects for details on implementation of particular features described in this article