Initialization Rules

The Rule Evaluation section enumerates all occasions when rules are evaluated in Aware IM. There is one other occasion not mentioned in this section albeit this occasion has a rather secondary nature compared to the ones described before.

When the user brings up a form to create a new instance of a business object (this may happen as a result of the user selecting a menu item of the “Create Object” type or as a result of the execution of the ENTER NEW action in some process), before the form is displayed the rules attached to the business object are evaluated and the appropriate actions are executed. The objective of rule evaluation is to initialize the attributes with their initial values. Because of this not all rules attached to the object are evaluated - only the initialization rules.

By default the system considers the following rules to be initialization rules:

Unconditional rules that set attribute values, for example
```
Policy.State = 'NEW' 
```
Rules that check whether a value is undefined and if so initialize this value, for example
```
IF Policy.Excess IS UNDEFINED THEN 
   Policy.Excess = 0 
```

It is also possible to explicitly specify whether the rule will or will not be used during initialization - see Advanced Rule Options.

All other rules are ignored at the initialization stage. However, when the form is submitted with the values entered by the user (who could have changed the initial values) all rules are evaluated as usual.