Oracle Policy Automation is a great tool for maintaining all your business logic in a word file instead of the app source code. In one of my projects I needed a business-analyst-friendly interface for changing business logic in a business process. Regular Oracle Business Rules work fine for up to a dozen of rules, then it is very easy to loose track. OPA makes a great replacement for OBR where you need non-developers to specify rules.
Just like most Oracle product OPA was invented by someone else (RuleBurst) and for something else (Siebel). It works fine with Oracle products thanks to SOA, but the level of integration is quite low at the moment (Jan 2013, 11gR2). So after building the rulesets from a Word or Excel file all you get is a .zip file you’re supposed to upload to your app server, in particular to the determinations.server.war/WEB-INF/classes/rulebases. This is a not an easy-to-remember path sitting deep in the tree and it could be problematic to change it. Let’s change it …
This can be done fairly easy. You need to edit setDomainEnv.sh (or.bat for windows) file and modify JAVA_OPTIONS near the end of the file so it looks like this: (UNIX version)
JAVA_OPTIONS="${JAVA_OPTIONS} -Ddeterminations.server.rulebase.dir=
Restart the server running the determinations-server.war and you are done.
com.oracle.determinations.server.assess.AssessEngine – Plugin directory could not be initialised
