Using the Question and Allowed Answers for a Decision

The Question and Answer section is a powerful way to help the business and IT think in the same way about a Decision by focusing them on the question being answered. While several different answer types are allowed, and more are planned, there are some limitations. For instance:

  • Is this offer valid for a refund? A validation result as well as a list of warnings and rejection reasons is required.
  • What is the quality of a paper? A quality score and a list of recommendations for changes is required.
  • What is the price of this article? A base price and a list of possible reductions is required.

Where the answer of a Question can be accompanied by additional information, as in the first and second examples, the Supporting Information field can be used to describe this additional information. The question returns an answer (Valid or not, quality score) and the supporting information contains reasons or explanations. In general this should be used where the additional information will not be processed but might be displayed or appended.

The third example is more complex as the Decision is returning a structure all of which might be processed. At this point DecisionsFirst Modeler does not support this as a single decision and so it would probably be best to model it as two separate Decisions that could be invoked as part of the same Task in a Process.