Design And Implementation Of The Expense Approval System Based On Rule Engine

Business rule is the industry standard that defines and restricts enterprise business structure and business behavior, as well as an important resource to enterprise business operation and management decision. Nowadays, accompanying such factors as diversified customers' needs, intensive corporative competition, and complicated and extended cooperation, enterprises are supposed to be adaptable to the market requirement with rapid and frequent transformation of business logics. In traditional application systems, business logics were closely integrated into program codes, which was difficult to respond to the changes. Therefore, it has become an urgent need to separate application logics from business process logics in application systems. And the technology of business rule management turns out to be a hot topic in research. Business rule management system (BRMS) interprets, maintains, deploys and implements the business rules. Meanwhile, it sets business rules apart from application codes, so as to manage enterprises more efficiently and flexibly. The research on business rule management technology has been carried out by such foreign companies as ILOG, and some application products have been developed in line with the standards of Java/C++, J2EE, XML and Web Service. But it seems that domestic research in the same field lags behind.In order to improve domestic research on rule engine and master the core technology on this field, I looked up relevant papers, books and other documents carefully, after that I developed a new instance of rule engine. I also implemented it in the Expense Approval System. After testing, it works very well. The key topics are mainly investigated including the definition, expressing, execution and storage of business rules, it also uses software engineering methodology to implement them. COM, ADO, XML any other technologies are involved in this project, and a three-tiers system is implemented.