Business rule versioning

PolicyCenter associates a version number and a status with each individual business rule. You see this information in the Business Rules screen, in the Version field. PolicyCenter manages the information in the Version field, you cannot change it yourself. If you have multiple versions of a rule, the Version field becomes a drop-down list, from which you can select a specific version of a rule to view.

Each version number starts at 0 and increments by 1 for each deployed version of the business rules. If you edit a business rule, PolicyCenter adds a plus sign (+) to the version number of the rule that you are editing, for example, 0+. Along with the version number, each business rule shows its state in parenthesis next to the version number, for example 0+ (Draft). Each version of a business rule is always in one of the following states:

• Draft
• Staged
• Approved

At the creation of a new rule version, PolicyCenter generates a work-in-progress rule with an initial status of Draft. This draft rule contains the same data values as the parent rule version from which it was made.

The work-in-progress rule must go through the three states of Draft, Staged, and Approved before it is possible to deploy the new rule version. After these three stages are complete, and after you deploy the rule, PolicyCenter assigns an updated version number to the rule. This version of the rule becomes the latest running version of the rule that PolicyCenter evaluates at runtime.

The version of a rule that PolicyCenter evaluates at runtime contains the word Evaluated after the version number. The Evaluated version of a rule is always the latest deployed version of a rule that can run in a specific environment.