Re: Enforcing Business Rules

Mike Briggs <mikeb_at_probes.com> wrote:
: If I move all the business logic into the application, it is all located in a
: central location, is VERY easy to modify, and I can clearly comment and document
: anthing I think I'll need to be reminded of later.
: Now, it's possible that most of you have much better memories than I do. Or
: maybe you've never had the joy of coming into an application designed with the
: business logic scattered over 20+ data tables with no documentation. Once you
: try this, it makes future decisions much easier!

To join this interesting discussion:
If you define all the business rules inside the database you are stuck to this proprietary environment. Has anybody experiences creating/maintaining database applications in an operating system and database independant way?

I am working in a project developing a layer between applications and (SQL-)databases where all business rules, logic, rapid application development of forms, visualisation of RDBMS-structure, etc. is located and centralized in mainly one model files. This should work with nearly every SQL-RDBMS. (Shurely this brings up other problems (like performance, security) which have to be solved.)

Does anybody of you know of similar projects and point me to some docs? We are especially interested in a generic way of implementing tools, e.g.:

• the requirements for forms should be a relatively short list of functionalities. Are there any papers about this floating around? Some of our questions are:
  • What is a complete description of the tasks a form has to fulfill?
  • Field validation (if possible) versus record validation? Is it a proven way to handle field validation by routines connected to 'before getting the focus' and 'when leaving the focus'.
  • should a form cover only one DB-table or should it be allowed to integrade several tables in one form. This has some important implications to the logic of the form (dependencies between tables, master/detail, etc.).
  • We want to parameterize each form totally by an external file. Are there existing languages/styles that are better for this job (we are thinking about XML).
• The same applies to a report generator. This should be quite generic for common SQL databases.

Thanks for any hints.
Helmut

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