Many readers showed great interest in the previous article on this subject : Intelligent Advisor New Feature : Hub Authoring, so we are back for a second look – more deep-dive into the new features and some bigger-picture stuff to help you get your head around the whole idea. Let’s get right to it.
- Your hub now has both Hub and traditional projects, all living happily together in your Workspaces. But a project that is authored in the Hub, stays in the Hub. And a project that is authored in Intelligent Advisor / Oracle Policy Modeling, stays in Policy Modeling. There is no crossover. When you look at a “traditional” project in the Hub, this is what you see:
Notice the message at the top of the page – this project cannot be edited online – you have to do it the traditional way.
2. The Editor is quite cool. There are lots of Hub Authoring features that you only come across when you spend a bit of time in the web authoring interface. Let’s look at some of the key points that make this better than many might have expected:
Keen-eyed readers will notice, before we go any further, that there are predefined spaces for headings and descriptions of a “block” of rules. What is a block? Well, I would liken it to a logical chunk – a paragraph, or a set of rules, that look like they logically belong together.The reason for starting a new block might be contextual – a new chunk of logic, or technical – maybe you have just written a rule as a simple Boolean but now you need to create a Table. In fact if you are one of the gazillion people who has a blog online and have just updated to the newest edition of WordPress with its “block editor” you will be experiencing the same sort of thing. Everything belongs in one service, but you can write it in blocks.
Back to the red lines – Hub Authoring error checking is live and in real-time. In the above picture, you can see I have copied the rule to create a duplicate. There is a red icon on the left to let me know what is going on. There are different things I can do. I can click on the red icon and get information about the issue, or I can click the dots and get ideas for what to do next.
You can see that the messages are quite “business friendly”. No more “multiply proven attribute” messages. In fact the word attribute is pretty much non-existent.
3. Coming back to the idea of blocks – there is no doubt that this new layout is a great way to get people to write cleaner, more structured rules. Take a look at this:
You can see three different blocks – a Boolean rule, an assignment rule and then a Table. And of course you are also nodding because you can see the function YearDifference() in there – the concept of the Rule Assistant that we have today is also present while entering information into the blocks, as the next screen capture can show:
4. And the final point for today – we will continue this series in a few days – is that the progress of your work is clearly mapped to the concept of committing a version. Once you commit a version (with the button) , if you keep working you are (obviously) working on the draft of the next version. And the ability to run any version, revert to a version, export and import – everything is available from the same screen.
Run any version,view any version, revert to a version…it’s all there!
So as you can see, the Web Authoring interface is beginning to deliver it’s secrets. More later this week but in the meantime you can read about it in the online help!
You can catch all the articles in this series about Hub Decision Service Authoring here : read part one, part two and part three.