DMN Cookbook: 50 Decision Modeling Recipes to Accelerate Your Business Rules Projects with Trisotech, Red Hat, and Drools

Decision Model and Notation (DMN), the new standard for business decision modeling, is changing the methodology of business rules projects.  While its Decision Requirements Diagrams (DRDs) and decision tables can be used to create business requirements handed off to programmers in a traditional rule language, DMN is actually a complete rule language shared by business and IT.  Its various boxed expressions and FEEL expression language allow programmers and technically oriented modelers to create complex decision models directly executable on a DMN engine such as Drools/Red Hat Decision Manager. 

DMN Cookbook explains how the DMN language works and how it differs from traditional rule languages.  It goes on to provide over 50 recipes illustrating DMN solutions to common problems facing decision logic developers, from manipulating strings, numbers, date/times, and lists to table queries and joins, iteration, recursion, and set operations.  It also shows how to incorporate Java static and non-static methods, deploy DMN models as REST services, and invoke those services from a variety of clients, including Java, a BPMN process, and Microsoft Flow.  Extended examples cover data validation, handling logic variations using either a central registry, dynamic composition, or static composition, a DMN-enhanced blockchain Smart Contract, and state chart-based pattern recognition. 

Each recipe includes a problem statement, a complete illustrated solution including DRD, boxed expressions, FEEL code and test case data, and discussion of the issues involved.  Some examples illustrate multiple approaches: DMN 1.1 FEEL, DMN 1.2 FEEL, Java, and Drools extensions.  All examples are explained and downloadable for editing and execution using Trisotech DMN Modeler.

Bruce Silver is Principal at Bruce Silver Associates, provider of consulting and training in business decision management and business process management. Through BPMessentials.com and methodandstyle.com, he is the leading provider of BPMN and DMN training and certification worldwide, with well over 4000 students trained using the Method and Style approach. His book DMN Method and Style provides a business-oriented introduction to decision modeling with DMN. His book BPMN Method and Style, second edition with translations in German, Japanese, and Spanish, is considered the definitive standard on BPMN. He served on the BPMN 2.0 task force in OMG and currently serves on the DMN Revision Task Force. He was also a founder of the DMN TCK working group. In addition, he is founder and co-host of bpmNEXT, an annual conference showcasing the latest developments in business process and decision management technologies. Previously he was Vice President and Service Director for workflow and document management at the analyst firm BIS Strategic Decisions, now part of Forrester Research. He has Bachelor and PhD degrees in Physics from Princeton and MIT, and holds four US Patents in electronic imaging. To contact him, email bruce@brsilver.com.