Overview

Centerprise Integration is a suite of high-performance data transformation and integration products. Designed to efficiently handle high volume data integration tasks, it makes extensive use of parallel processing to deliver a high degree of scalability.

Centerprise business rules syntax closely resembles Excel formula syntax and is designed to make it easier to learn and use. Rules are used throughout the product to accomplish a variety of tasks including filtering, validation, and transformation.

This document provides a brief overview of the rules language and discusses some of the product features where business rules are used to bring power and flexibility.

Centerprise Rules Language

Centerprise rules language features a familiar syntax similar to Microsoft Excel and other formula languages. The rules language has a large library of built-in functions to perform common string, date, and number manipulation. Additionally, the ability to add custom function is provided enabling you to call outside components and services.

Centerprise rules are developed using a full-featured syntax editor that provides syntax highlighting,intellisense, and tooltips to assist rule development.

Business Rules in Centerprise

Centerprise Integration Studio uses business rules in a number of areas. The power and usage of rules will progressively increase in the upcoming versions of the product. Key uses of business rules include:

• Validation Rules
• Transformation or Mapping Rules
• Data Filter Rules
• Database Update Conditions

Validation Rules

When reading from incoming files, Centerprise automatically performs checks to ensure that values in fields are valid for data types. Validation rules can be used to perform additional data checks. You can use any combination of fields from the incoming record in source validation rules. Similarly, destination validation rules can use any field from the destination record. For data profiling purposes, validation rules can be attached to specific fields. When a validation rule attached to a field fails, the field's error or warning count in the data profile is updated accordingly.

Transformation or Mapping Rules

Centerprise provides a number of ways to map incoming data into destination fields. These include direct mapping, list lookup, database, lookup, and rule expressions.

While direct or lookup transformations suffice for some fields, there is a need for a more expressive transformation language in other cases. Centerprise rules language makes it easy to write simple or complex
transformation rules. Centerprise's function library provides over a hundred built-in functions. Additionally, adding custom functions to the rules language is a straightforward process.

Source Filter Rules

Source filter rules are used to filter out incoming source data. If you receive a data file containing records that you do not wish to import, you can define filter rules to remove these records during the reading and parsing phase of transformation. Filter rules are different from validation rules in that they do not generate an error or warning.

Database Update Conditions

You can define database update conditions to control whether a record is written to the database. These conditions are applied after transformation and validations have taken place, and immediately before writing to the database. You can use database update conditions to compare incoming and current values and decide whether the record should be updated.

Viewing Errors and Warnings in Data Profiler

Centerprise features a data profiling module that provides summary and detail level information about composition and quality of data. Data profiler provides field level, record level and aggregate information about validation errors and warnings. For more information on Data Profiling,please refer to Data Profiling in Centerprise.

Related Articles

Data Profiling in Centerprise