About Family- and Field-Level Rules

In GE Digital APM, family-level and field-level rules consist of code that determines how records in the GE Digital APM database will behave under specific conditions. Rule code is written in Visual Basic.Net (VB.Net), a programming language that is compatible with the language in which GE Digital APM is written. In this way, you can specify that when certain actions are taken in GE Digital APM, certain rules should be executed.

IMPORTANT: Modifying rules without the proper knowledge and expertise could cause your system to work improperly.

The purpose of writing business rules for a family is to control how records in that family will behave when you work with those records in GE Digital APM. The rule code itself can be stored in two locations:

Within the family rule project itself.
Within the Rules Library.

Rules can range from very simple to highly complex. If you have sufficient knowledge of writing VB.Net code, you can use Microsoft Visual Studio to customize your system to suit the specific needs of your organization.

Writing complex rules requires knowledge of VB.Net that exceeds the scope of this documentation. The purpose of this documentation is to explain the basic structure of family rule projects and to describe the tools that are available to help you write rules. In addition, we provide some basic information about rule code itself to help you understand and navigate your existing rules and some basic examples of custom rule code.

Note: Family policies allow you to make changes similarly to family-level rules, but family policies are created in a user interface where knowledge of Visual Basic.Net (VB.Net) is not required.