The S1000D specification talks a great deal about business rules which it defines as “decisions that are made by a project or an organization on how to implement S1000D”[[6]]. Initially there was a feeling in the project team that business rules were probably unnecessary for the Knowledge Warehouse project. Of course they would be essential if for developing technical documentation for an aircraft but for general-purpose document management they seemed an unnecessary concern. This thinking was quickly proved wrong once users were let loose on the system for the first time. Business rules are in fact absolutely key to the success of any S1000D project and it is for this reason that the specification talks about them so much, and especially, about the Business Rule Decision Points (BRDP) and Business Rules Exchange (BREX). Without any business rules, authors are free to create whatever content they want, provided that the document remains valid according to the relevant schema.
Table 9. A word of advice..
| Don’t be shy of business rules. Business rules are your friends and will makes the lives of everyone involved in the project easier with a little up-front investment in time and effort. Without business rules, you may suddenly find your beautifully crafted S1000D system no longer functions as expected just because a user has entered an incorrect code or has failed to enter required information in a particular field. |