Automated Business Rules Transformation into a Persistence Layer

Enterprise Information Systems maintain data with respect to various business processes. These processes consist of business operations restricted by business rules expressed as preconditions and post-conditions. Each rule must be considered and enforced throughout the system, from user interface to persistence storage. Such rule evaluation in multiple contexts results in both significant rule restatement and high maintenance complexity, as there is no single focal point for capturing and reusing these rules. In this paper, we apply the Aspect-Oriented Design Approach to the persistence layer to simplify business rules management, enforce business rules throughout the system and consequently decrease development and maintenance efforts. Our preliminary results show that it is possible to define business rules in a single place and then apply them automatically in a persistence layer. We retrieve data sets restricted by given operation post-conditions with respect to current execution context without any manual rule restatement. This paper provides a small case study emphasizing the benefits and future challenges.