Workbench Personalization

The BRFplus workbench is the central place for modeling and testing business rules. BRFplus offers many opportunities to configure the look and feel of the workbench so that it best suits your individual requirements. To access the personalization settings, choose (Personalize) in the upper right corner of the workbench window.

Note Note

Most of the changes that you make to the personalization settings are effective immediately after closing the Personalization dialog and navigating to another object. However, some of the personalization settings require that you restart the workbench before changes take effect.

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Features

User Mode

BRFplus addresses business users as well as business experts and developers. Since both types of users have different requirements concerning their working environment, and since sometimes the same person has to act in both roles, BRFplus lets you customize the BRFplus workbench according to your needs. This includes the possibility to differentiate the look and feel of the workbench between two role-oriented modes per user, simple mode and expert mode.

The user mode setting has two aspects:

Scope for personalization settings
The changes that you make to the personalization settings are recorded by the system with respect to the currently selected user mode. That is, if you change for example the Views settings in simple mode, this does not affect the Views settings for expert mode and vice versa.
User mode selection
When you open the personalization dialog, the system displays the user mode that is currently in effect in the workbench. To change the user mode, make the desired selection and choose Save. The system adapts the workbench rendering according to the settings that have been defined for the newly selected user mode.

General

Maximum Number of Query Results
With this setting, you can define an upper limit for the number of matching items that the system displays in response to a query. Reducing this number can be helpful if your system contains very many objects and you are experiencing slow system performance. This setting affects the object lists presented by the system when you search for an existing object. If the number of matching objects for a query is higher than the setting that you define here, the system notifies you accordingly. You can then decide either to increase this value or to refine your search criteria.

Default: 200.

Note
The number of objects listed in the Repository view is not affected by this setting. Here, the system always displays all objects that were found as the result of the last search action that you have performed.

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Show Technical Names
With this setting, you can define whether the system shall use the technical name or the short text for displaying objects. Using the short text is normally more convenient since this text is in natural language and may be translated into different languages. The technical name, however, has the advantage of remaining the same, regardless of the logon language. This can ease communication between persons who use to log on to the system with different languages.

This setting affects the display behavior in the workbench navigation panel as well as in the work area header for an object that you are currently working on, and also for all references to dependent objects (for example, all rules in a ruleset, the data objects used by an expression, and so on).
Show Technical Aspects
With this setting, you can control whether or not the system shall display those tools in the Tools menu that are more technical in nature and meant for system administrators and programmers, like Application Administration or XML Export. For business users, we recommend that you keep this setting off to avoid confusion.
Show Technical Attributes
With this setting, you can define whether the system shall display additional technical data for some of the BRFplus objects. For example, you can see the internal IDs of a decision tree node or of a catalog node. This data is mostly needed for technical investigations and debugging and not necessary for business users.

In addition, this setting controls whether the number of decimal places of an elementary data object with subtype Amount is visible. This information is ignored anyway because at runtime, the number of decimals for an amount is automatically derived from the central settings in the currency tables. In other words, displaying the number of decimals for an amount data object or not does not make any difference for the system behavior.

Note
The common nature of all the data that is controlled by the Show Technical Attributes flag is that setting this flag or not does not impose any functional restrictions on the user. This is the major difference to the Show Technical Aspects setting discussed in the earlier section, which is used to hide major parts of the tool functionality from the user.

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Show XML Schema
With this setting, you can define whether during XML export, the user can decide which XML schema shall be used for the data to be exported. If you leave this setting switched off, the user cannot influence the schema selection. In that case, the system uses the internal schema by default.
Object Timestamps Based on UTC Reference Time
With this setting, you can decide how the system shall render the object-related timestamps. This setting affects the creation date and time as well as the change date and time of an object, the timestamps of object versions, and the validity period of rule objects. It has the following effect:
- On
  All displayed timestamps are transformed into their UTC equivalent (UTC = Universal Time Coordinated). This provides you with a standardized time base for all BRFplus objects in the system, regardless of where, when, and by whom they have been created or changed. This setting is recommended whenever you have to compare, or operate on, objects based on their timestamps.
- Off
  All displayed timestamps are shown according to the timezone settings of the user who has created or saved an object. This setting is normally considered convenient from a user's perspective, but can lead to confusion if different users in different timezones are working on objects in the same system and you need an overview over different objects based on their timestamp.
In summary, using UTC timestamps is advisable for administrative tasks with lots of objects to be processed, while local timestamps help the user to better understand when a particular object has been created or changed.

Note
The timestamp setting has no effect on date and time values that you use in data objects of type timepoint, nor on date and time functions in formula expressions. Here, the system always expects UTC timestamps.

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General Section Expanded
With this setting you decide whether the system shall display an object's administrative data by default or not. If you switch this setting on, the system expands the General section on top of the work area whenever you navigate to a BRFplus object. This gives you a comprehensive overview of all the data recorded for an object, but displaying the data consumes some space on the UI. Switching this setting off hides this information and grants you considerably more space for effective work with the object settings.

Views

On this tab, you can define which of the different views shall be offered in the workbench navigation panel, and which one of the selected views shall be presented when the workbench is started. This setting provides some built-in consistency checks to make sure that at least one view is selected, and that the default view is among the selected ones.

Repository

Include in Repository
With this setting, you can define which objects shall be presented in the Repository view of the workbench, depending on their storage type. You can, for example, decide that system objects shall be hidden as you would not change these anyway.
Deleted Objects
BRFplus provides a multilevel deletion strategy that is used to keep objects in the system available for a defined period of time although, from a business perspective, they are considered obsolete or no longer needed. With this setting, you can decide whether such objects shall be displayed in the Repository view or not.

Catalogs

With this setting, you can define which of the object catalogs in the system shall be available in the Catalog view of the workbench navigation panel, and which one of these shall be presented by default.

Catalogs are a means to reduce complexity and to protect the user from getting lost in the multitude of objects that may exist in the system. This principle of complexity reduction is further enforced by the concept of catalog personalization. As opposed to the Repository view, where all objects belonging to an application or being part of a search result are presented, the system does not present all existing catalogs in the Catalog view. Rather, using the Catalog view requires that you choose one of the following options:

In the Repository view, choose Display in Catalog View from the context menu of a catalog object.
Configure the view in the Personalization dialog. This configuration is done in a two-step procedure:
1. Click the Add button and select from the list of all catalogs in the system the ones that you want to make available in the Catalog view.
2. From the catalogs that you have selected in the previous step, make one the default catalog by clicking the Is Default column.
Once you are done with the view configuration, you can use the Catalog view. When you open the Catalog view, the system presents the default catalog. All other catalogs that you have selected as your personal catalog list are available via Switch To Other Catalog in the Catalog view.

Note Note

It is possible to bypass the preparatory steps for catalog use outlined above. In the Repository view, choose Display in Catalog View from the context menu of a catalog object. The system then swaps from Repository view into Catalog view, with the selected catalog ready for use. Although this mechanism is not recommended for daily use, it is definitely helpful for test purposes when you are about to define a new catalog and want to have a quick look at the result.

In contrast to all other settings in the Personalization dialog, the system does not make a difference between the user modes with respect to catalogs. In other words, there is only one set of catalog settings that is effective both for Simple Mode and Expert Mode.

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Expression

On this tab, you find additional settings for some of the more complex object types available with BRFplus.

Decision Table

Show Table Settings
When you are editing a decision table expression, the system initially hides the detailed definition screen for column and row settings. If you want to change this definition, you first have to click the (Table Settings) button at the rightmost border of the Detail section toolbar. With the Show Table Settings setting, you can define whether this button shall be displayed or not. If you decide to hide the (Table Settings) button, a user has no access whatsoever to the row and column definition, but can still create and maintain rules in the table. This setting can be useful to protect very complex decision tables from unwanted changes.
Display Row Numbers
Indicates whether the system displays an additional column for the row numbers. Displaying row numbers is helpful for orientation in tables with many rows, and even inevitable when it comes to discussions on certain table content between different persons. On the other hand, displaying a row number column occupies space that could otherwise be available for data columns.

Note
If you decide to let the system display the row number column, you can still move that column via drag&drop to any desired position. It is not designed to always occupy column number 1. Dragging it to a position more to the right can free some space for data columns but still gives you a chance to always find out the current row number.

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Number of Visible Rows
With this setting, you limit the number of rows that are shown for a decision table at once to a particular amount. This is useful in case of large decision tables with several thousands of rows that otherwise would lead to performance problems. Of course, you can scroll down to see the other rows. The system then reads the required table rows from the database and displays them accordingly.
Minimum Columns for Horizontal Scrollbar
With this setting, you define the lowest number of columns in a decision table that lets the system display a horizontal scrollbar. Tables with a complex structure and many fields tend to have a wide horizontal scroll range, so that it is impossible for a user to have a complete overview of the entire table row. When you increase this setting, the system reduces the width of all columns so that the given number of columns is displayed. Only if there are still more columns beyond that limit, the system displays a scrollbar. Increasing the number of columns reduces the column width and can sometimes lead to cropped cell content (though still accessible via the cell tooltip), but lets you benefit from a better overview of the table content.

Note
The system takes all table columns into account that are actually displayed when it calculates the column width. This includes result data columns as well as the row number column that can be displayed on demand, whereas columns that have been hidden in the table settings are ignored.

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Ruleset

Number of Rules Expanded
With this setting, you limit the number of rules that are shown for a ruleset in expanded form to a particular amount. This is useful in case of large rulesets with dozens of rules inside that otherwise would lead to performance problems. The rules that are beyond the value that you enter here are initially displayed with only one line per rule. You have to expand them manually to see their details.

Filters

On this tab, you can maintain the assignment of object filters to applications. With the Add button, you create a new filter assignment. For each assignment, you can choose whether the filter shall be applied to all applications in the system or not. If not, you can create additional lines per filter to define the individual applications for which a given filter is in effect. If you switch the All Applications setting from No to Yes, all individual assignments that you may have defined are lost.

Note Note

Maintaining filter assignments is an administrative task and should normally be done in a system-wide consistent manner rather than being seen as an individual preference of single users. Therefore, this tab is mainly meant for information purposes and presented in read-only mode for most of the users.

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Hotkeys

On this tab, you find a predefined list of user actions that are commonly used across all kinds of BRFplus object types, like saving, deleting, checking, and so on. For each of these actions, you can define a custom hotkey out of a list of possible hotkeys that encompasses the following ranges:

CTRL + 0 ... CTRL + 9
CTRL + A ... CTRL + Z
CTRL + F2 ... CTRL + F12

Note Note

If a user action that is associated with a hotkey is unavailable (for example, the Back button is disabled if there has been no previous navigation step yet), then the hotkey is propagated to the web browser and might trigger an action that has been associated with that hotkey by the browser manufacturer. For example, the Back action is by default associated with the CTRL + B hotkey. If the Back button is disabled, pressing CTRL + B would instead trigger the Organize Favorites function defined in Microsoft Internet Explorer, or open the Bookmarks sidebar in Mozilla Firefox.

In contrast to the aforementioned behavior, the CTRL + F4 hotkey is handled directly by the operating system. Pressing this key always leads to the current browser tab closing immediately, without giving a user the chance to decide whether this is wanted or not. Since BRFplus cannot override this behavior, the CTRL + F4 hotkey is not offered in the list of assignable hotkeys.

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