Welcome to another in our periodic back to OPA basics series. At the moment I am watching a lot of new starters join a set of experienced developers. And funnily enough, both groups sometimes are stuck in their routine. For the new people, they fall back on what they know from other rules engines. For the more experienced people, that are familiar with Oracle Policy Modeling, they repeat what they learned long ago and do not necessarily see anything that has been added to the application in the intervening time since they first started using it.

So here are top five cool time savers and useful things you can find in Oracle Policy Modeling today.

• The Rule Assistant

I still find it strange that many people don’t use the Assistant in Word. If there was ever a tool to avoid having to remember the arcane spelling and phraseology of an Oracle Policy Automation attribute, this is it!

• The Convert to Test Case Export

Watching people filling in every cell in their Test Case spreadsheet, when they probably have already saved many of the initial scenarios as debug sessions, I think they should remember the fact that they can move a unit test into a Test Case, and vice-versa.

• The Find Unused Attribute Filter

I tend to use this one when the Rule Assistant has not been used very much, so we are looking for duplicate / mispelled attributes in our Project (see Rule Assistant, above).

• The Inclusion Report

OK, so I’m probably cheating as far as this example of OPA Basics is concerned, but it is a real time saver. In 19A, the introduction of the Inclusion Report has saved me time already. Great for beginning an impact assessment when some sort of surgery is required on Project structure. Find out more here.

• The Export Entity Data Model Option

This is a tiny little option hidden away in the toolbar but I’m often asked by non-OPA people for the data model and I find this export really simple and quick to use.

Well, that’s our top five OPA Basics for now. What other tricks do you use to get the most out of Oracle Policy Modeling?

Let us know in the comments!