Essential Biztalk Business Rule Engine Interview Questions & Answers:

1. Explain me how do we provide/include custom XSLT in the map?

Click on the map grid and in properties tab specify the location where custom XSLT is stored against the property "Custom XSLT path".

2. Explain me what is Long term fact and Short Term fact?

The fact is the user data to which rule conditions are applied. At design time a fact is a reference to that data.
Facts have two categories – Short Term Facts and Long Term Facts. Consider a loaning process of any Bank. We can think a “loan application” as short term fact. Short team facts are business information which changes per occurrence. On the contrary, “interest rates” do not change very regularly. This business information is steady and we can consider it a long term fact.

3. Do you know what are maps?

Maps are graphical representations of XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) documents that allow us to perform, in a simple and visual manner, transformations between XML messages. A map file basically is the XML file that defines the correspondence between the records and fields in one schema and the records and fields in another schema. You create a map when you want to transform or translate data that you receive or send from one schema to another.

4. Do you know what is a Policy?

A policy is a logical grouping of rules. You compose a version of a policy, save it, test it by applying it to the facts, and, when you are satisfied with the results, publish it and deploy it to a production environment.

5. Tell me what is the tool that I need to use to create Business Rules?

You need to use the Business Rules Composer. This is a graphical tool used for authoring, versioning, and deploying policies and vocabularies.

6. Explain me what is Rete Algorithm, does it have any relation with BRE?

Rete Algorithm is an efficient pattern matching algorithm for implementing production rule systems. BRE's inner working is based on the Rete algorithm.

7. Tell me is it possible to have a global variable in a map?

Yes. Choosing inline code allows us to declare global variables outside the method declaration. These are accessible throughout the map from within all inline code scripting functoids.

8. Tell us what is the difference between Publishing and Deploying the Rule?

Rule alone cannot be published or deployed, it has to be wrapped under Policy and then published and deployed. When a policy is deployed it is ready to use and can't be edited whereas when published, policy aren't ready for use.

9. Do you know what is a Business Rules Engine?

A run-time inference engine that can link highly readable, declarative, semantically rich rules to any business objects (.NET components), XML documents, or database tables. It can evaluate rules against facts and initiate actions based on the results of that evaluation.

10. Explain me is it possible to change Business Rule policy after it was published?

No. After policies are published it can't be edited. But if there is a need to have a change in policy then new version of policy is to be created.