A runtime pattern is used by the XPlatform to run the application. It therefore needs to contain some information about how each node should be implemented. The Engine Details
screen allows these details to be entered. This page is accessed by clicking the link from the Node Viewer
screen for a particular runtime pattern node.
The top section of the page allows us to specify the type of Engine that the node will use, as well as its associated logicsheet. The bottom section allows us to specify any other resources for our node.
Engine Details
The engine name and description values are used mainly for display purposes, so we can detail what this engine is and does. The Engine Type
value is more important, as this controls how this node will be implemented at runtime.
The nodes within Runtime Patterns are responsible for performing the required logic and processing at runtime to ensure the application works as expected. In order to do this, each node contains an engine
within it. This engine can be one of two types, either XEngine or a Custom Engine. The XEngine is the standard option which provides a complete XML based rules processing environment. This will be used for the vast majority of nodes within a project. If however you have a specific custom requirement, it is possible to use a Custom Engine, which allows any Java code to be executed within the runtime platform environment. Hyfinity provide a number of Custom Engines for scenarios such as querying SQL databases, handling non XML fixed format input streams, and sending emails and other notifications, but any required functionality can be implemented as a custom engine. Please contact Hyfinity for more information.
The Engine Runtime Instance value should contain the full Java class name of the engine implementation that this node should use. If XEngine
is selected, then this value will be automatically populated, but otherwise it will need to be entered manually.
Regardless of the type of engine being used, a Logicsheet
needs to be specified. This file contains all the information that the engine needs to perform its task. For a standard XEngine, this will contain a set of rules that will be used to interrogate and manipulate the XML data. The Logicsheet select box will be filled with all the logicsheets currently defined for our project, along with any in the generic category. When the runtime pattern was originally cloned from a base pattern, a valid logicsheet should have been created for every node, but this can be changed if required by selecting a different value from the list. If the required logicsheet is not shown in the list, it will need to be placed in a logicsheet category for the project. See Managing Assets for more information on how to achieve this. The logicsheet description text box allows us to enter a description of the logicsheet if needed.
The Rulebase link on the left hand side of this page will open the selected logicsheet in RuleMaker so that it can be viewed and edited as required. See the Hyfinity® RuleMaker User Guide for information on how to use RuleMaker.
Resource Details
The bottom half of this screen is concerned with which resources (other than a logicsheet) this node will need. Some examples of resources used by a node could be XSL files to transform the data in some way, XML documents containing fragments of data to insert into the current XML content, or schema files to validate the data sent to a node. So that the deployment process knows which files are needed by each node, any of these resources needed at runtime should be listed on this screen.
In most cases, you will find that these resource definitions are automatically added as you construct your application logic using studio components such as RuleMaker and FormMaker. If needed however, you can add resource definitions manually.
To Add a resource to the list for this node, we need to select the file from the categories. This is a two step process, we first select the appropriate category using the Available Resource Categories
select box, and then we select the file in the Resources in Category
select box. Clicking the Add Resource
button will then add the selected file as a resource for this node. Once again the resource we wish to use needs to already exist in one of the asset categories for our project.
We can remove a resource by selecting the resource in the list with the radio buttons and clicking Remove Resource
. This only removes the link between this node and the resource, it does not delete the actual file.