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Concepts in Policy Management |
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The more academic name for business rule enforcement is policy management. Policy management doesn't necessarily have to be solely enforced in your Visual Basic application. Business policy management, in fact, is realizedat least in partin the application you develop. A well-managed organization has a set of policy rules in place to ensure that the organization's customer base and shareholders are perpetually satisfied. |
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Due to the increase of technology in the world of information processing, a well-managed organization is also one that is competitive with its peers in its industry. Thus, in recent years, when software applications written in languages such as Visual Basic gave organizations a competitive edge on peers without any software automation in place, the rush for applications soared. Underlying this rush is the fact that part of the organization's business policy management infrastructure became embedded in applications as opposed to residing solely in organizational manuals and the minds of employees. |
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Business policy management in applications requires an infrastructure for ensuring that organizational policies are properly enforced. This involves the collaboration of the Graphical User Interface and Database (or Persistence) Subsystems. Concerning the involvement of the Graphical User Interface Subsystem, business policy management is not necessarily to be confused with formatting and typographical error rules. For instance, a rule governing whether or not a user entered a special character where only date values should go is generally not viewed as a business rule. However, if the organization requires that a date value be entered and persisted to a database with a slash (/) instead of a dash (-), this is an organizational policy. |
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Note
Keep in mind that all Graphical User Interface (GUI) rules are enforced in each form's corresponding controller class. This makes it easy to reuse GUI rules from form to form, and project to project. |
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Remember the rather intriguing adage, All rules are meant to be broken? The underlying notion in this adage should guide you in implementing your or the organization's policy. Each time that the user or some client object violates a rule, a class in the Business Rules Subsystem must raise an error. (See the lesson for Day 18, The Error-Processing and Exception-Handling Subsystem, for more on raising errors.) When you raise an error regarding business rules, this is similar to raising an exception. An exception is an abnormal path that occurs in the processing of business rules. |
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