In 10.1.3, the two types of rule repositories are file-based and WebDAV. WebDAV is recommended for production deployment, but some people may still want to use a file-based repository. Support for product lifecycle is not as strong when using a file-based repository, so this post describes the manual steps that must be performed.
When you deploy the BPEL process with a decision service that uses file repository, a copy of repository is packaged with the decision service. The decision service refers to this copy when executing. To modify the rules without redeploying the BPEL process, you must modify this copy on the server. To do this, go to the BPEL Console, click on your BPEL process, and go to the descriptor tab. This page contains a link to open the deployed rule repository using Rule Author.
Changes to the deployed dictionary will be reflected in decision service instances created after the dictionary is saved. A stateless decision service keeps a pool of rule engine instances which it re-uses, and will refresh these instances with new ones when it detects the dictionary has changed. A stateful decision service creates a new rule engine instance every time it is invoked and will always be created with the latest version of the dictionary.
If you make changes to the deployed file-based dictionary, you must manually copy this file back into your JDeveloper project if you wish to have the changes persist in the next deployment of the decision service.
