Possible to add input validation on Decision Builder?

[thomaskennedy]

Is it possible to add input validation on a decision table? For example if the question column is a String, and I want that string to be unique, and the user has added the same string a second time, can I put up an info message? I have tried adding "after|insert" and "after|update" business rules to various underlying tables such as sys_decision and sys_decision_input but nothing happens.

[Maik Skoddow]

Hi @thomaskennedy 

I think you are on the wrong path as the decision builder is completely independent of any UI-related issues like entering values or making sure that these values are unique. The best would be you forget for a moment that you are leveraging a decision process and try to implement the described behavior first in your application and/or experience and then add the decision logic. And the final solution really depends on many criteria and context you haven't provided so far and therefore I cannot go more into the detail.

Maik

[thomaskennedy]

The context is that I'm importing complex files according to rules maintained by users. These rules map vendor file values to references or other values. The user maintain the contents of the decision tables, and I read, and sometimes update, those tables through the API. I need to be able to inform the users when there are gaps and duplication in their mappings, so they can understand the overall health of the integration and decide when they need to down tools and go fix the broken mappings. This feedback is provided through UI builder, which reads each DT and checks them against each other ("Is this reference in Decision Table A but not in B? Is this part id listed twice?" and so on) and spits out its findings.

It would be nice to be able to catch some of these  items up front, hence my question about putting input validation on the DT itself via BRs.

So I'm not "making a decision" so much as "mapping value A to value B, or B, C and D". It's a slightly odd way to use DTs, but it gives a me a decent UI and handles the storage.

I would like to hide the mapping implementation completely and populate it programmatically based on selections from users* -- UI Builder again, probably -- but that would be a lot more technical debt and I would be, in effect, recreating the Decision builder UI. So I have held off doing that and just accept that the decision builder isn't very helpful in this one respect.

* another way to do would be to have the users upload a spreadsheet containing all their mappings, but that would identify references only by their string name, which brings in its own issues, and doesn't really solve the input validation problem.