This blog post is part of a series to support those moving to Intelligent Advisor Cloud ahead of Premier support for Intelligent Advisor on-premises, formerly known as Oracle Policy Automation, ending in September 2025.
This post specifically explains how to best prepare your projects for migration from v10.4 to v12 when using the migration tool in Oracle Policy Modeling (OPM v12) to migrate projects.
Get ready!
To ensure that you are using the latest version of the migration tool, make sure that you are using the latest version of OPM. This is available from the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud (12.2.36), or from Intelligent Advisor Hub. See Install Policy Modeling for more information.
It is recommended that you take an iterative approach to migration. That is, focus on one or a couple of projects first, not all of them at once. Start by identifying a simpler or moderate project to migrate, not the most complex one. You will learn things along the way that will help you migrate your other projects.
TIP! You can do an initial run of your v10.4 project through the migration tool ‘as is’ (that is, before any pre-migration preparation) to get a feel for the types of migration warnings and errors that are going to be encountered. A suggested approach would be to:
- Run the migration tool
- Identify relevant v10.4 preparation work
- Make changes in your v10.4 project
- Re-run the migration tool
- Repeat as required.
Get set!
There are many pre-migration steps you can take in the v10.4 project that will reduce migration errors and reduce post-migration clean-up work. If you are doing multiple iterative test migrations, where possible, make the change once in v10.4, rather than having to keep re-doing the changes in v12 repeatedly.
TIP! Having a solid test suite in v10.4 will ensure that you have a baseline for regression testing when your rules are running in v12.
Note that in v12 you no longer have to define variables (now known as non-Boolean attributes) prior to using them in rules. To allow for this, there needed to be some tightening up of the rules about writing rules, which will become clearer below.
Attribute text changes – Some rule functions have both a terse form of the syntax as well as a natural language form. For example, AddMonths(<attribute>, number of months) (terse form) and the date X months after <attribute> (natural language form). Make sure that you are not using the natural language form of any functions in regular attribute text in your v10.4 project. For example:
- the date one month following the person’s 18th birthday (this attribute text is fine)
- the date one month after the person’s 18th birthday (this attribute text will cause an error on migration because “the date X months after” is the natural language syntax for the AddMonths function)
Use the Change Text Globally feature in v10.4 if you need to edit any attribute text.
Special characters in rules – In v12 rules, you must have a space either side of special characters if they are intended to act as mathematical symbols. For example:
- the monthly amount = the annual amount / 12 (this rule is fine; it will be treated as a calculation)
- the monthly amount=the annual amount/12 (this rule won’t work; the entire expression will be treated as an attribute)
You can’t have spaces if the symbol isn’t meant to act as a mathematical symbol. For example:
- the person was runner-up in the competition (this attribute text is fine)
- the person was runner – up in the competition (this attribute text is not fine; without spaces, the “-” will be treated as a minus sign, so this will be treated as a calculation)
Make sure that your v10.4 rules align with this. After making any tweaks to your v10.4 rules, run your v10.4 test scripts to confirm that the rule logic has not been impacted.
Compatible function syntax – Most of the v10.4 functions have not changed in v12. However, there have been some changes:
- Some functions no longer have a natural language form in v12. Change the use of these functions in v10.4 to use the terse form of the syntax. These functions are Concatenation, Contains, EndsWith, IsNumber, StartsWith, Exponentiation, Exponentiation (Constant e), Natural Logarithm and Logarithm.
- Some functions are no longer supported in v12. These are the DifferenceExclusive and DifferenceInclusive functions for HourDifference, MinuteDifference, MonthDifference, WeekDifference and YearDifference. Use of these functions in v10.4 will need to be addressed after migrating the rules to v12.
- Some functions have changed syntax in v12. These are Concentate and Modulo. Use of these functions in v10.4 will need to be addressed after migrating the rules to v12.
Non-rule documents – If you have large or numerous non-rule documents (for instance, design documents), consider excluding them from the v10.4 build before running the conversion to speed up the migration process.
Test scripts – If you have a significant volume of test scripts in your v10.4 project, you can speed up the migration tool by removing the test scripts for your initial runs of the migration (then adding them back in to the project later once any issues with the migration of the rulebase itself have been resolved).
Customizations – Many things that required customizations in v10, such as custom functions, custom properties and custom screens, are now out-of-the-box in v12. Identify any customizations so that you can review them in line with current v12 functionality.
New functionality in v12 – There is a lot of new functionality in v12, especially in relation to interviews. You may want to take the opportunity to enhance the use of interviews, rather than just migrate it.
TIP! If you are experiencing a large number of migration errors despite making the changes identified here, please raise an Oracle support ticket for assistance. Also, if you identify possible enhancements to the migration tool that would make your migration much easier or faster, raise a Service Request so that the Intelligent Advisor development team is aware. They may be able to enhance the tool.
Go!
You should now have a better sense of the changes that will be required to migrate your v10.4 projects to v12 and be ready to start the migration process on all your projects.