XRX/Business Rules Template

Motivation
You want to create a simple "rules editor" that allows non-programmers to maintain simple business rules for an application.

Method
Business rules are expressed as a set of conditional statements. Each conditional statement has two parts: a condition and an action. For example, the following is a simple business rule that can check the validity of a date:

IF (TransactionDate > currentDate) THEN ERROR, MESSAGE="Transaction date must be in the past"

The if portion of the rule tests to see if the transaction date is larger than the current date. If it is, then the date is not in the past. The submission of the form data is rejected, and a useful error message is returned to the user.

One of the best examples of a simple rule editor is an email rules editor. This is usually set up as a template such as the following:

To be done...

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