Is BRF(+) the right tool for this job?

Hello everyone,

I've read a number of interesting blogs about BRF and BRF+ some time ago. In a current project, I have some requirements that sound like it might be a good idea to try implementing them using BRF(+). Since I haven't used BRF before, I'm unsure whether this is really a good idea or just a waste of time. I'll try to outline what I want to do:

The focus of the project is the clinical documentation of a certain medical condition. For this, we use a custom-built documentation application which is integrated into the hospital management system (IS-H/i.s.h.med) using standard document management tools. The application is a classic (dynpro) dialog application with some additional controls. The documentation itself is fairly complex (three levels of master-detail tables, over 100 parameters that can be selected or entered). From this documentation, a set of so-called procedures have to be generated. These procedures are basically identifiers that indicate that a certain medical activity was performed. They play an important role in the determination of the total revenue generated by the treatment of the patient. There are supported interfaces to add and modify procedures, and from previous projects I know how to read the current procedures, compare them to the generated procedures that come from some sort of rules engine and issue the appropriate commands to bring the current procedures to the desired state.

I do not yet have a full specification of the rules that will be used to generate the procedures, but from past experience I assume that they will contain stuff like "if a certain flag is set for any of the records in ..., generate procedure X" or "Check all records in table A where column B = C and select the greatest value in column D. With this value, use a mapping table to determine the procedure". To keep things interesting, the rules change at least once a year.

In the past, I've solved this with custom-tailored ABAP coding and customizing tables. This works, but the rule set always requires an experienced developer to adapt it. Even with careful documentation, very few non-coders understand the idea behind the condition and mapping tables. Besides, coding and maintaining a rule set processor is a lot of work. I'd like to try and use the BRF (or BRF+? we're on SAP_BASIS 701) - do you think that this is a good idea or a waste of time? I'd rather not spend a few weeks trying to bend BRF to do something it wasn't meant to do...

Thanks

Volker