Whether you're a functional administrator tailoring your end users' interactions or an end user yourself, business rules enable you to create rules to control how regions and fields on a page are displayed at runtime, based on conditions such as the user's role and the employee's business unit or legal employer.

Business rules allow you to easily control what's displayed on the page as a whole, instead of configuring page elements such as tables and forms individually. For example, you could create a single rule to conditionally hide every occurrence of a field on the page, in every form where it appears. If you were to do this using rule sets, you would need to configure the rule set for each form to hide the field.

If you don't see the Business Rules pane in your view of the Properties pane, that means your page is not enabled for business rules, but you can still use business rules to override field properties in components. In addition to a rule sets editor, each Layout has a business rules editor where you can configure rules for fields in the rule sets. You can use the rule sets editor as described in Control Your Display with Rule Sets to configure your components, and then use business rules to override field properties.

Before we dive into how to use business rules, it's important to realize that you work with business rules in the context of an extension. If you're not familiar with extensions, you should probably read both What Is an Extension? and What's the Extension Lifecycle?, at a minimum.