Decision Management (ODM,ADS)

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 Excel testsuites from XML Trace

T. Ibis's profile image
T. Ibis posted Thu July 10, 2025 03:52 AM

Hello,

is there any way of parsing a XML trace and mapping the values to a Excel Scenario used for testing the ruleapp? 

Writing scenarios in Excel for large XOM can be very time-consuming.

There seems to be some interesting classes (e.g. inside ilog.rules.dvs.excel) in the RuleDesigner API. However they are poorly documented.

The ability to automatically fill up Excel testscenarios with desired data would be highly useful for both customers and the IT-department.

Thanks in advance

Antony Viaud's profile image
Antony Viaud

Hello, 

the best approach would actually be to implement a custom scenario provider for testing. The custom implementation would transform input XML into Java objects, to feed the testing scenarios. 

See related doc and sample : https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/odm/9.5.0?topic=rules-setting-up-custom-data-providers 

There is no need to use an Excel file when the data model is complex or when there is a large number of scenarios.

Andy Macdonald's profile image
Andy Macdonald

As Antony has suggested the custom scenario provider is the way to go. I built a demo a few years ago using that code as a starting point to extract the data from the Decision Warehouse to use as a Test Suite and also Simulations. I seem to recall that the XML format extracted is not in the same format that is required for input to a rule service so you need to manipulate it first. Originally I was creating clean XML from it but more recently I was generating a JSON payload from it. It was a demo so the data was flat and not very complex so it did not take long to generate the JSON with a few simple REGEX expressions and a long string concatenation.

T. Ibis's profile image
T. Ibis

Alright, thank you guys.
I will try creating a custom scenario plugin.