Hi,
What is the best way to represent a rule based on a matrix of values?
Example: I have a plant and want my rule to return one or more categories.
Plant 1000: categories A, B
Plant 2000: categories A, C, D
Plant 3000: categories B, C, D
Unfortunately a decision table only permits a single elementary result per row, so the above cannot be implemented directly. So I end up having to create a multiple-result decision table containing:
1000: A
1000: B
2000: A
2000: C
...and so on, with 8 entries in total.
This works, but with larger datasets and multiple condition columns it becomes cumbersome to maintain, even with Excel.
If a "Matrix" expression type existed, it would look like this:
Category >> vv Plant | A | B | C | D |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1000 | X | X | ||
| 2000 | X | X | X | |
| 3000 | X | X | X |
And it would be dead easy to manage. Unfortunately, it doesn't exist.
One alternative would be to invert the logic to specify one entry for each category:
Plants 1000, 2000: Category A
Plants 1000, 3000: Category B
Technically feasible, but impractical to maintain because from the business point of view it's the wrong perspective.
Is there a more elegant way than a long multi-result table to achieve this?
Thanks,
Mike