Richard Naszcyniec's Blog

"Oracle Business Rules makes processes and applications more flexible by enabling business analysts and non-developers to
easily define and modify business logic without programming."  That is a nice blurb on what it does straight from the web site.  When working with Siebel you use Oracle Business Rules (OBR) for your integration work.  While you could use it with your Siebel configuration, you are better off using the Haley rules engine which allows you to easily manipulate objects from the Siebel CRM repository.  The ease of repository object manipulation is the driving factor in that decision.

However, for integrations using Fusion Middlware (FMW), you should use the OBR engine.  OBR is easily called from the FMW suite and it is easy to set up facts from XML schemas.  Regrettably, when Siebel generates WSDL for web services it will typically embed several schemas within the types section.  This causes a challenge when using OBR since you define XML facts from XML schema documents.  While you can extract schemas from the Siebel WSDL and put them in separate XSD documents, you need to perform this task manually along with reconciling the cross schema dependencies via include statements.  Considering how tedious and maintenance intensive that becomes, I offer this tip:

• When creating OBR XML facts from Siebel web service message, formulate your own XML schema to contain the data you want to dervice facts from.  Then, at runtime, transform the Siebel web service result message into an instance of your XSD.

Using this tip you are free to work with native Siebel WSDL operation message structures with any extensive schema extraction and editing.  Instead, your coding and maintenance is limited to defining an XSD schema tailored to your OBR XML fact needs along with an XSL transform document.  Since you are likely to use a BPEL process for your integration, with Siebel, exercising an XSL transform, and then calling OBR is a fairly trivial set of steps.