Use Business Rule Preparation to Normalize Values Before Conditions

Problem Overview

Conditions that look correct often fail in practice because of invisible inconsistencies in the source data. A condition checking whether Country equals 'Germany' fails silently if the actual value is '   germany  ' - two leading spaces, lowercase. The data is semantically correct, but the string comparison fails. These kinds of surface-level inconsistencies are extremely common in data from manual entry systems, legacy exports, or third-party sources.

Solution

The Preparation stage runs before Conditions and Actions within a Business Rule. It accepts formula-based transformations on Domain values and assigns the result back to a Domain - overwriting it for the remainder of that Business Rule's execution, without permanently modifying the source data.

Preparation steps execute in order, and each step's output is immediately available to the next. The Formula Editor provides a visual, Excel-like builder for configuring each step. Available operations for string Domains include:

• Lower / Upper: Normalise letter casing
• Trim: Remove leading and trailing whitespace
• Concat: Combine multiple fields or literals, with an optional separator
• Regex Replace: Apply a regular expression substitution to clean complex patterns
• Substring: Extract a portion of a string value
• String (reference): Pass a value from another Domain or a Data Link column into the step

Preparation steps can also reference Data Link values, making it possible to compute an expression using reference data and use the result on the left-hand side of a condition - a capability that is not available through conditions alone.

More information on all the available Operations per data type, are available here: Preparation: Transforming Values Before Conditions

Configuration

1. Open the Business Rule in Edit Version mode and locate the Preparation section above the Conditions area
2. Click Add Step. A new preparation item appears with a Domain dropdown and an Edit button
3. Select the Domain to prepare from the dropdown
4. Click Edit to open the Formula Editor. Select the operation from the first dropdown and configure its inputs. The dark preview area at the bottom shows the resulting formula in Excel-like notation
5. Close the editor. The formula is displayed on the step
6. Add further steps as needed - each can use the output of previous steps

Outcome

Conditions become substantially more reliable when operating on prepared values. Fewer rules need to be written to cover formatting variants, and Business Rule logic can focus on business meaning rather than defensive string handling. Because Preparation is scoped to the individual Business Rule, changes to preparation steps have no side effects on other rules or on the source data itself.

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