Boolean Values – Getting Started with Oracle Policy Modeling
Working with new starters to the wonderful world of Oracle Policy Modeling, I often come across interviews that have lots of Boolean attributes. Of course, deciding whether you need a Boolean or something else instead is part of the challenge for new learners : lots of “simple” ideas using Booleans turn into something more complicated and interesting later on.
The main challenges I want to focus on today are those related to the display of the Boolean attribute in the Interview : how to make it more appealing, useful and above all more efficient for the user. Let’s look at some interesting stuff :
Default Values in Oracle Policy Modeling
The simplest and often the most efficient approach is to ensure that the Boolean attributes have appropriate default values : both static and dynamic can be useful. The new input controls from the November 2016 version give us more flexibility (and less messing with CSS) to make things easier to use / view. Below for example is a Switch control, and a defaulted value.
Remember however that these are default values for the interview control, not for the attribute. As some of my colleagues this week found out, this can lead to a bit of a mix-up in trying to create dynamic display of values. Let’s investigate.
Getting Mixed Up with Boolean display
In the image above you can see the checkbox has been checked. This is because we added a default value to the control.
Earlier in this article I mentioned that the default value was (as you can see above) for the input control, not for the attribute. You can see this has a side-effect : when you try and set a second Boolean attribute to use the first one as a Dynamic Default, the perhaps expected behavior is not present. The second Boolean attribute does not register the value.
For example, in the following case, the image “200 Euros” is actually a Boolean Image Control. The colleague in question had changed the type of the Boolean input control to Image. The “clicked” and “unclicked” images had been added to the input as follows:
The default value for the input control had been set as follows:
The Dynamic Default is based on a Boolean attribute which is true, if the customer has spent a value greater than 200 Euros. But the image will not be shown as checked, since the attribute underlying the image does not have a default value – the default value is on the input control. So the effect does not work. The attribute that should have made it work, does not have the value needed:
I have been seeing this quite a lot recently, perhaps because people have been experimenting with the Image control and the new exciting configuration options in November 2016 release. But the approach is not going to work, and the better, simpler (and working) approach is as follows:
- Add three images to your Screen. One blank, One for the “TRUE” and One for the “FALSE”. You might want a third one to use in cases of uncertainty to ensure that the layout of the page does not shift too much when the “true” or “false” images are displayed.
- Set the display logic to use the value of the Boolean so that the blank is displayed when the value is uncertain, the “TRUE” image is displayed when the attribute is true and so on.
The Interview Screen looks something like this during the preparation. The first three bullets are three images. The final is an example of setting the display behavior.
Now the overall effect is what you would expect : changing the value of the threshold (here, 201) to a value where the Boolean is true, triggers the display of the image in Oracle Policy Modeling debug.
I hope this clears up some things for some of my colleagues this week.
See also: