Chapter 2. New features

Decision Central has been renamed to Business Central to improve consistency between Red Hat Decision Manager and Red Hat Process Automation Manager. However, all Red Hat Decision Manager file names and URL components remain unchanged to prevent impact on existing Red Hat Decision Manager distributions. For example, the Business Central URL in Red Hat Decision Manager continues to be http://HOST:PORT/decision-central.

You can now set Decision Server to run in production mode, formerly the default setting, or in development mode, the new default setting. Development mode provides a flexible deployment policy that enables you to update existing deployment units (KIE containers) while maintaining active process instances for small changes, or to reset the deployment unit state before updating active process instances for bigger changes. Production mode is optimal for production environments, where each deployment creates a new deployment unit, as in previous releases.

Along with this improvement, Business Central also includes new Build & Install and Redeploy options for building and deploying projects. In either a development or production environment, you can select the Build & Install option to build the project and publish the KJAR file to the configured Maven repository without deploying to a Decision Server. In a development environment, you can click Deploy to deploy the built KJAR file to a Decision Server without stopping any running instances (if applicable), or click Redeploy to deploy the built KJAR file and stop any running instances. The next time you deploy or redeploy the built KJAR, the previous deployment unit (KIE container) is automatically updated in the same target Decision Server. In a production environment, the Redeploy option is disabled and you can click Deploy only to deploy the built KJAR file to a new deployment unit (KIE container) on a Decision Server.

To configure the Decision Server environment mode, set the org.kie.server.mode system property to org.kie.server.mode=development or org.kie.server.mode=production. To configure the deployment behavior for a corresponding project in Business Central, go to project Settings General Settings Version and toggle the Development Mode option. By default, Decision Server and all new projects in Business Central are in development mode. You cannot deploy a project with Development Mode turned on or with a manually added SNAPSHOT version suffix to a Decision Server that is in production mode.

GIT hook execution handling now includes UI notifications to indicate if a script is executed successfully or with a warning or error.

Authoring collaboration enables users to configure the contributors or a project or space and their role (owner, admin, or contributor) with associated privileges.

You can now use a template to deploy the Red Hat Business Optimizer Employee Rostering starter application on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform with persistent data storage.

Various distributions of Java 11, such as OpenJDK 11, have been certified as runtime platforms, on par with the pre-existing Java 8 certification. In addition, with this release we are including support for OpenJDK on Windows.

Red Hat Decision Manager support for Spring Boot has been updated from Spring Boot 1.5.x to Spring Boot 2.1.x.

The Decision Model and Notation (DMN) designer in Business Central is now fully supported in Red Hat Decision Manager 7.3. You can use the new DMN designer in Business Central to design DMN decision requirements diagrams (DRDs) and define decision logic for a complete DMN decision model. Red Hat Decision Manager 7.3 provides both design and runtime support for DMN 1.2 models at conformance level 3, and includes enhancements and fixes to FEEL and DMN model components to optimize the experience of implementing DMN decision services with Red Hat Decision Manager.

The improved DMN designer also includes the following notable enhancements:

For more information about DMN support in Red Hat Decision Manager 7.3, see the following resources:

The Test Scenarios designer in Business Central is now fully supported in Red Hat Decision Manager 7.3.