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About Family-Level Rules

Whereas field-level rules control the behavior of specific fields within a record, family-level rules reside within the code item that represents an entity family and control actions performed against the entire record.

Note: As an alternative to writing basic family-level rules, you can use family policies to configure the actions to be performed against a record. Family policies are created in a user interface where knowledge of Visual Basic.Net (VB.Net) is not required. For a single family, you can write family-level rules or family policies, not both. You can, however, use the Baseline Rule node in a family policy to execute any existing GE Digital APM baseline rules that correspond to the policy’s family and trigger.

Family-level rules provide flexibility in determining how records will behave. Some of the most common uses of family-level rules include:

You can create family-level rules by developing custom code.

GE Digital APM supports the following family-level rule types.

Rule Type Stores logic that is executed...
BeforeInsert Before a record is created.
AfterInsert After a record is created.
BeforeUpdate After changes have been made to a record, before those changes are saved to the database.
AfterUpdate After changes to a record have been saved.
BeforeDelete Before a record is deleted.
AfterDelete

After a record has been deleted.

A change to a record in the GE Digital APM database will trigger the appropriate rule regardless of the current user’s permissions. However, if a user does not have permissions for an action a rule is taking, the rule will not execute and the transaction will be rolled back and no changes will be made. Similarly, the transaction will be rolled back if an error occurs during the rule’s execution.

Example: AfterInsertClosed

One use of an AfterInsert rule is to create a link between two families after a new record is created. Consider an example where, when you create a Functional Location record, you want to link it to the Site Reference record that represents the site that contains the functional location. You can accomplish this by creating a family-level rule for the Functional Location family.

The following code shows an example of an AfterInsert rule that you could write to create a link between the Functional Location record and the Site Reference record after the Functional Location record is created. You would insert this rule into the family-level code item for the Functional Location family.

                        Public Overrides Sub AfterInsert()
ManageSiteReference()
                        End Sub
                    
 
Private Sub Manage Site Reference ()
    Dim session As EntitySession = CurrentEntity.Session
 
    If session Is Nothing Then
        session = New EntitySession(ApplicationUser)
    End If
 
    Dim currentSite As SiteReference = SiteReference.LoadExisting(session, CurrentEntity)
    Dim newSite As SiteReference = SiteReference.RetrieveSiteReference(session, CurrentEntity)
 
    If currentSite Is Nothing AndAlso newSite Is Nothing Then
        Return
    End If
 
    If currentSite Is Nothing And Not newSite Is Nothing Then
        newSite.AddAssetToSite(CurrentEntity)
    ElseIf Not currentSite Is Nothing And newSite Is Nothing Then
        If Not CurrentEntity.Fields("MI_FNCLOC00_SAP_SYSTEM_C").Value Is DBNull.Value Then
            currentSite.RemoveAssetFromSite(CurrentEntity)
        End If
    ElseIf currentSite.Key <> newSite.Key Then
        currentSite.RemoveAssetFromSite(CurrentEntity)
        newSite.AddAssetToSite(CurrentEntity)
    End If
                        End Sub
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