To ensure that your application includes all the features that your business process requires, explore rules that define these features. By exploring rules before you define new elements of your app, you can also avoid duplicating resources, and as a result, save time and development costs.

• Finding rules by type

  You can use the Records Explorer to find all instances of a specific class, or rule type. By using the Records Explorer instead of searching, you can quickly find a rule when you know its type but do not know its name.

• Finding rules by class

  You can use the Application Explorer to find rules that share the same class. By using the Application Explorer instead of searching, you can quickly find rules that are in your application or inherited by your application, without having to know their names.

• Finding rules by name

  To find sibling rules, which are rules with the same name (key parts) but different rulesets or versions, do the following.

• Finding rules by dependency

  Save development time and find rules by dependency with the Referencing Rules tool. Instead of conducting a full-content search, you can quickly locate a rule in context by tracing the relationship between the rules in your application.

• Comparing rule versions

  Compare rule versions to resolve merge conflicts, debug code, and audit changes that application developers made during rule check out. You can compare a rule with versions of the rule from before the rule check out, with the branched versions, or with the same rule in other ruleset versions.

• Comparing rules by system

  You can use the Rulebase Compare wizard to identify differences in the rules present on two Pega Platform systems. For example, you can use the tool to confirm the success of a product migration between systems, or to identify the changes needed to synchronize two systems.

• Bookmarking a rule

  You can use favorites to bookmark a rule so that you can quickly find it later. You can create favorites that are visible to your operator exclusively, another operator, or all operators within a specified access group.

• Searching for a rule

  Dev Studio provides full-text search for non-deprecated rules, data objects and the help system. You can search help system topics at any time. Searching for rules or data depends on system-maintained index files.

• Reporting on rules

  You can report on rules of more than one type and rules that are checked out. For reporting purposes, searching all instances of the classes derived from the Rule- base class, or even all instances of the Rule-Service- class, can impact performance. To provide more efficient reporting, you can create report definitions that query the database view that corresponds to a particular class.

• Viewing rule history

  You can view the saved history of a rule to see when it was changed and by whom. You can also compare the current version with a previous version or restore a previous version of a rule for testing purposes, or if the current version is faulty.

• Viewing rule versions

  View rule versions by selecting Actions View versions . A dialog box appears and displays the versions of the rule, their availability, and their circumstance. You can click an item to open the rule form.

• Viewing the generated Java of a rule

  After you save a rule form, you can view an approximation of the generated Java to be created by a rule instance by selecting Actions View Java .

• Viewing the XML of a rule

  If you have the @baseclass.ToolbarFull privilege, you can view the XML document that comprises the form that displays a rule instance by selecting Actions View XML .

• Designing applications for reuse and extension