Using Decision Making Web Services

A common theme in many of our customer conversations is around the idea of exposing business logic as a web service. Let’s take a quick look at why this is such a common topic – and some of its implications.

Integration with other business applications is the driver for this idea. At some point in another application either a decision needs to be made, or a question needs to be answered before a decision can be made. Using a quick web service call to send data, have that data processed, and then return results in a way that the calling application can consume is a great way to build in business logic that is easy to maintain. A business rule engine can make this a common pattern among all of your applications.

For example, an insurance company may have a quick quote application on its website where a user fills in a few forms and needs immediate validation (either live on form or after submission) of their application. Having a rule engine in the background ready to be called when needed can keep the application light and give the business team more control over the logic that determines eligibility or insurance rates. This same set of logic may also be used within the full application – making it easy to keep both the quick quote and the full insurance application on the same page.

We’ve made an effort to make this very easy in Decisions with the Integration Details button. This button can be found at the top of nearly every Decisions object and it let’s you define how you want other applications to interact with Decisions.

Quick article on calling rules using REST here: http://documentation.decisions.com/external-applications-calling-rules-rest/

REST is not the only type of web service we can support – feel free to contact support@decisions.com or browse documentation.decisions.com for a full overview.