Rulesets store related groups of business rules, serving as containers for various types of application components. Rulesets also provide security, version control, and functions to deploy or migrate an application between environments.

You begin customizing your application environment by duplicating existing Pega 8 application rulesets and using them as a starting point to configure your own rulesets. By modifying copies of the rulesets instead of the base rulesets themselves (which are protected), your changes remain isolated from product changes. This isolation allows you to upgrade the base application and test the changes in your environment before merging the changes into your rulesets.

The rulesets that come with your application can be divided into these categories:

• Rulesets that define class hierarchies for site-specific work objects and other data, access roles and privileges for users, home page display, and tools. You must modify these rulesets during deployment to suit your environment.
• Rulesets that define product rules and include activities, data model classes and properties, and the work object hierarchy. You will likely customize these rules, but doing so is not required for proper product operation.
• Rulesets that are shared across Pega 8 applications, such as PegaApp, which contains workflow components, PegaAppFin (for financial accounting), and PegaAppResearch (PegaRESEARCH Manager).

Rulesets are arranged hierarchically, with more general rules at the bottom and more specific rules at the top. For example, in the following ruleset hierarchy diagram the Pega-ProcessCommmander, Pega-RULES, etc., rulesets control the underlying Pega 8 operations, while PegaSINostro, and PegaSI control application functions.

Your Company Ruleset

• PSIP - HealthCheck
• PegaSIAppguides
• PegaSINostro
• PegaSIPymt
• PegaSI
• PegaAppResearch-CommBank
• PegaAppResearch
• PegaCommBank
• PegaAppCorr
• PegaAppFin
• PegaApp
• Pega-UITheme
• UIKit

The ruleset order is critical to rule resolution. To find the appropriate rule to execute, Pega 8 begins with the top ruleset in the list and, if the rule is not found, moves to the next ruleset. In this manner, custom site-specific rules have precedence over application-specific rules.