Best Practices for Modeling Decisions

For optimal decision model development in Oracle Integration, adhere to these best practices and recommendations. They improve development, maintenance, and readability of decision models.

  • Adopt a bottom-up approach to develop a decision model. Start by creating the lowest-level decisions, which provide input to other decisions. Finally, create the main output decision, which provides the model's result.
  • Ensure that only one user edits a decision model at a time to avoid conflicts and preserve data integrity.
  • Add and connect all the nodes on the canvas before configuring the logic within decisions. This provides all the necessary data as suggestions during the configuration process. See Connect Nodes on the Canvas.
  • Use decision tables where possible; they're the preferred form of logic. See Configure Decision Tables.
  • In decision tables, avoid using the First (F) hit policy. This hit policy makes the decision logic overly reliant on the order of the rules. See About Hit Policies.
  • Use functions to apply a decision logic multiple times, for example, while applying a logic to each element of a list. See Configure Functions.
  • Avoid using functions unnecessarily; they make decision models difficult to test and debug.
  • Break down a complex, nested expression into simpler expressions.
  • Use boxed expressions instead of FEEL expressions, wherever possible, to improve readability.
  • Use nouns or short noun phrases to name each decision and input data (for example, Student Days, Total Days, Person). Do not use verbs in names.
  • Provide a description for each decision to indicate what it accomplishes, for example, Calculates total days by adding vacation and working days. Make all descriptions consistent with each other.