Implementing Business Rules with Decision Tables in Elixir

The blog post begins by explaining the concept of a Decision Table, an effective tool for managing business rules through a visual means that maps various inputs to their corresponding actions. It then presents a scenario involving an online bookstore, showcasing how the discount rates can be calculated based on the order amount and user's VIP level using a decision table. The author emphasizes the need for non-technical personnel, such as sales teams, to be able to update these decision rules without requiring changes to the primary application code or knowledge of Elixir. To achieve this, the post introduces the Tablex library as a solution allowing decision tables to be represented in a textual format within Elixir, which can then be parsed and utilized for making decisions during runtime. For optimization purposes, the author also suggests compiling the decision tables into Elixir code with the help of Tablex.CodeGenerator and Formular libraries, thus enhancing performance by avoiding string parsing on every execution. Lastly, the article touches on the benefits of using decision tables, such as better configuration management and consistent performance and teases a follow-up section that will delve into advanced features of the Tablex library.