Business Rules for MeF

Business Rules for MeF By Greg Martinez & Donna Mucilli Business Rules Schemas are only part of the story! Industry Manual/ERO Manual must still be created Post on state website along with the XML schema set Use Approved TIGERS Format Goal is to make it easy for

industry to support the state What are business rules? Known as error reject codes in legacy system Use to catch errors that are not formatting errors Business rules are not the spreadsheets used for category based filings. Those spreadsheets are not needed for forms based systems

Business rules best practices Error and Reject codes must be clearly worded Ideally should be clear to taxpayers as written Avoid using tag names in message text Rules organized by category For benefit of agencies & developers Rule numbers indicate what form it

applies to (i.e. F1040-001 vs. 0123) Keep business rules in sync with legacy system during transition period Generally, follow what the IRS does Types of errors caught by business rules Math rules (A + B = C)

Required supporting documents Required pdf attachments and naming conventions Soft edits that do not reject a return (alerts) Payment rules for the program Due dates and resubmission windows IRS business rule categories

Data Mismatch Database Validation Error Duplicate Condition Incorrect Data Math Error Missing Data Missing Document Multiple Documents Not on time System Error Unsupported XML Error Schema vs business rules Use schema to prevent formatting errors Data

exceeds maximum length Invalid data for data type Required fields Records in correct order Tag names are valid Enumerated lists Schema vs business rules PROs of using schema to validate Allows developers to self test No ambiguity as to error condition CONs of using schema to validate

Challenging to communicate reason for validation failure to the users Many XML parsers throw incomprehensible error messages! Use of XPath in error acknowledgments Lean toward schema validation vs. business rules