Smart Construction provides the ability to automatically assign work steps, along with their man hours and rates, to components in IWPs. These work steps form the basis of determining the completion status of an IWP. Administrators can configure rules of progress data to generate and associate work steps with components.
By default, the Rules of Progress Service delivered with Smart Construction communicates with an XML file generated from a Microsoft Excel workbook that is delivered with the Smart Construction server installation.
The Smart Construction administrator can check out and modify the workbook, then generate a new XML file with rules of progress data for the Smart Construction site to fit the specific needs of an organization.
The rules of progress data in the generated XML file are associated with components during the Smart Construction retrieve. After a retrieve is started, the Smart Construction Rules processor queue generates and associates the rules of progress information with retrieved components. The Rules processor queue creates a separate scheduler task, SPC Rules Processor Scheduler, to relate the scheduler to the Rules processor queue. The SPC Rules Processor Scheduler task regularly polls the queue to process the rules of progress data for retrieved documents.
If you choose not to use the delivered workbook or XML configuration file or if you already have a rules of progress system, you can create your own version of the Rules of Progress Service. In order to do this, you must implement the IRulesOfProgress WCF Service Contract and create a rules of progress component as described in the Smart Construction API and Programmer's Guide.