ObjectStar Data Access - Impulse Solutions

12/11/13
OSB™ Rule Maintenance
Rel 1.0
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TITLE
OSB™ Rule Maintenance
AUTHOR
David Crichton, Impulse Solutions Ltd.
CLASSIFICATION
Technical Paper
RELEASE
1.0 – 11th November 2013
This document describes the tools and processes available to users of the ISL
OSB™ Tool Kit for creating, maintaining, analyzing and validating OSB™ Business
Rules.
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1
Contents
1
Contents ................................................................................................ 2
1.1
List of Figures .................................................................................... 2
1.2
Changes from Previous Issue ............................................................... 3
1.3
Document Cross References ................................................................ 3
1.4
Revision History ................................................................................. 3
1.5
Impulse Solutions Ltd ......................................................................... 3
2
Introduction .......................................................................................... 4
2.1
Intellectual Property Rights.................................................................. 4
3
OSB™ Rule Concepts ............................................................................. 5
3.1
Overview ........................................................................................... 5
3.2
OSB™ Data Access ............................................................................. 5
3.3
Embedded COMMITs ........................................................................... 6
3.4
Node Consistency ............................................................................... 6
4
Rule Management Tools ........................................................................ 8
4.1
Extended Rule Editor .......................................................................... 8
4.2
Rule Linkage Validation ....................................................................... 8
4.3
TAM Access Validation ......................................................................... 9
4.4
Rule Scanner ................................................................................... 11
5
Rule Structure Monotoring .................................................................. 13
5.1
Rule Tree Display ............................................................................. 13
6
Rule Promotion Management .............................................................. 14
6.1
Promotion Manager .......................................................................... 14
6.2
Rule Comparator .............................................................................. 14
7
The Tool Kit.......................................................................................... 16
1.1 List of Figures
Figure 1: Rule List ............................................................................................ 8
Figure 2: Linkage Check report .......................................................................... 9
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Figure 3: TAM Analysis - Level 1 ...................................................................... 10
Figure 4: TAM Analysis - Level 4 ...................................................................... 10
Figure 5: Numeric Selection in Character Field ................................................... 11
Figure 6: Rule Scan for COMMIT....................................................................... 12
Figure 7: Filtered display for COMMIT; .............................................................. 12
Figure 8: Rule Tree Display ............................................................................. 13
Figure 9: Rule Tree - Rule Summary ................................................................. 13
Figure 10: Rule Promotion display .................................................................... 14
Figure 11: Rule Library Comparison .................................................................. 15
1.2 Changes from Previous Issue
None
1.3 Document Cross References
The distributed ISL OSB™ Tool Kit manuals should be used to provide
additional reference together with the current OSB™ Release Manuals.
1.4 Revision History
1.0
11th November 2013
1.5 Impulse Solutions Ltd
Impulse Solutions Ltd is an OSB™ Consultancy which has been
developing utilities and add-ons for OSB™ for over nineteen years. It
has also provided resource for application development and
maintenance at a number of European and Australian customer sites
and has contributed a number of functions to the OSB™ IDE graphical
tool.
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2
Introduction
This document is intended to provide a guide to the tools provided as
part of the ISL OSB™ Tool Kit for the maintenance, analysis and
validation of OSB™ Business Rules. These provide functionality which is
not available in the distributed product.
2.1 Intellectual Property Rights
Tools described in this document which are additional to the distributed
functionality have been designed and developed by Impulse Solutions
Ltd which retains the intellectual property rights to the techniques and
specific implementation.
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3
OSB™ Rule Concepts
3.1 Overview
The unique features of the ISL™ Business Rule coding structure provide
a highly efficient process for development and maintenance of
applications with productivity levels significantly higher than any other
comparable process. In particular, the ‘code and go’ ability to run code
without any need for compilation or linkage enables fast iterative
development and testing.
However, the cost of this is the relatively small size of each individual
piece of code (or Rule) determined by the amount that can be stored in
the LIBRARY table. This requires techniques that will be familiar to
anyone who has ever developed a z/OS Type 4 SVC (as I learned over
35 years ago!).
With the ability to reuse Rules and to build structures for common usage
it can very easy to lose track of the relationships especially when
making design changes to an existing process. In addition, when code
has been accepted for production and promoted to the SITE library,
further maintenance or enhancement may require management of a
mixture of rules in either the local development library, SITE or both.
This can be difficult when using the distributed Rule Editor as it can only
process code in a single library.
Finally, the process of promotion itself can be difficult to manage in
order to ensure that all relevant Rules and non-rule objects are included
in the generated set of promotions. Where development takes place in
more than one local library this process becomes even more complex
and open to error.
3.2 OSB™ Data Access
The very simple process used in OSB™ to access data with its use of a
single externally-defined reference for any data source – something
made necessary by the limited size of Rules – and the resultant absence
of data definitions in individual rules is a very powerful mechanism.
More information about these concepts can be found in the ISL OSB™
Data Management Guide which can be downloaded without charge from
the ISL website at www.impulse-solutions.co.uk.
In addition, the Assignment by Name feature (A.* = B.*) makes the
process of transferring data from one table buffer to another simple and
concise.
A potential problem exists with this feature when the fields of individual
tables with the same name have not been created using the Global Field
option and have conflicting characteristics which may result in either an
assignment error or data overflow depending on the circumstances.
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Data selection is in turn simplified by the very powerful WHERE options
which are critical for development of effective data processing routines.
However, when complex selection is used it can be difficult to ensure
that selection is actually limited to those data rows required and does
not result in every row being read (a table sweep) which can create
significant overheads if the table contains a large number of data rows.
Finally, a specific overhead was created in recent release of the product
in cases where a numeric value is used for selection when a complete
table sweep will occur.
All of these conditions are detected by the ISL TAM Analyser.
3.3 Embedded COMMITs
A specific problem relates to applications which have been developed
with earlier versions of the product efore the amount of data that could
be accumulated before saving was extended in all platform versions.
This required the use of the COMMIT verb to update permanent data
tables in the middle of a transaction rather than at its end.
While this is a valid process in specific circumstances it can cause data
integrity issues should an error occur within such code. It is
recommended that early applications be analysed to determine if such
procedures have been used and if so to rebuild them to remove the
embedded COMMITs.
Because COMMIT is actually an operation code it cannot be found by
basic scanning of object code. The ISL Rule Scanner, however, can
detect these and display any rules containing this operation.
3.4 Node Consistency
If a correctly managed promotion process is used to migrate code from
the development node up to the final production system the contents of
the SITE library will remain consistent and allow further changes to be
promoted successfully.
However, when promotions have been rolled back or temporary fixes
made to production systems which have not been carried back to
previous nodes inconsistencies can occur which may cause subsequent
promotions to fail or introduce logic errors which affect processing. One
major client subcontracted support for its production node to an outside
organization which did exactly that with the result that a major upgrade
encountered a large number of issues and required extensive reengineering.
ISL provides a Rule Library Comparator tool which can be used to detect
such inconsistencies easily. If distributed processing is implemented this
can be done directly between the SITE libraries in two different nodes. If
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not, a copy of SITE from, for example, the production node can be
unloaded and reloaded into the development node under a different
name and comparison made.
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4
Rule Management Tools
4.1 Extended Rule Editor
This displays a selection of rules from a local library in a similar format
to the standard Rule Editor but also includes any matching rules in the
SITE library to give an integrated set, with the addition of extra fields to
indicate whether a rule is in the local library, SITE or both. If it is
present in both then the differences between the two can be displayed.
The Linkage Validation and TAM Check tools can be invoked from this
tool for individual rules. The entry rule is GENX_EDITX or it can be
selected directly from the ISL Tool Box utility framework.
Figure 1: Rule List
4.2 Rule Linkage Validation
This scans a set of rules to detect a number of error conditions and
generates a MSGLOG report. The conditions checked are:
•
•
•
•
Call to non-existent rule
Call with incorrect number of arguments
Attempt to call a function rule
Attempt to invoke a non-function rule as a function
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Figure 2: Linkage Check report
4.3 TAM Access Validation
This scans a set of rules to detect errors in data access definitions or
assignment errors. It can be run at one of 5 levels where each condition
is included in the higher levels:
1. Inefficient Access only
2. Definition issues in table references
3. Above plus missing tables and indirect call option
4. Above plus validation of table/field assignments
5. Above plus unresolvable indirect references
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Figure 3: TAM Analysis - Level 1
Figure 4: TAM Analysis - Level 4
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Figure 5: Numeric Selection in Character Field
4.4 Rule Scanner
This scans a set of rules for a specified string or reserved word. It can
be used specifically to detect embedded COMMIT verbs.
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Figure 6: Rule Scan for COMMIT
Figure 7: Filtered display for COMMIT;
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5 Rule Structure Monotoring
5.1 Rule Tree Display
This tool displays the call structure of the descendents of an entry rule,
including embedded rules and indirect calls where these can be
resolved. Optionally, a summary list of rules in the structure can also be
displayed.
Figure 8: Rule Tree Display
Figure 9: Rule Tree - Rule Summary
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6
Rule Promotion Management
6.1 Promotion Manager
This tool displays a set of objects of a specific class and shows where
these have been assigned to an open Promotion. Unallocated objects
can be added to a Promotion from a selection list.
Figure 10: Rule Promotion display
6.2 Rule Comparator
This tool can be used to compare rule libraries to display differences
between them.
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Figure 11: Rule Library Comparison
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7
The Tool Kit
In addition to the tools referred to above, the Impulse Solutions Ltd Tool
Kit provides a large number of routines for maintenance and analysis of
code.
These tools are described more fully in the relevant Impulse Solutions
Ltd User Guides.
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