Examples

While looking at the examples below, you will notice that they all depend on the environment variables being set up correctly. The BBL was designed to be a simple rules-engine type of programming language that can be understood and created by non-programmers: the business people. It was therefore intended to be part of a larger system - one that will set these variables up to the appropriate values before these example programs will be run. Using the With statement you could - for the most part - set up the variables within the program itself, but that defeats the purpose slightly and should only be used in this fashion as examples.

Note: Some minor features may not be supported yet, but these examples are all planned to work for version 1.0.

Simple Pricing Engine

Even though this is a fairly simple pricing engine, it does do a good job of showing off some of the capabilities of the BBL. You will see the following:

  • A good use of the multi-part Result concept.
  • Using the Do statement to group statements together into the same scope.
  • The use of percentages.
  • Comments

The following variables must be set in the environment:

Variable Name Type Description
Cost Number The base cost of the item being priced
Category Text The category name of the item being priced.
AccountNumber Number The account number for the customer the items is priced for.
CreditCard Text The payment terms of the transaction
CouponCode Text A coupon code that will be applied to the transaction
CouponDiscount Lookup A lookup table with key CouponCode, and a Number as a value - the coupon’s value.
CCFeeExempt Logical True if the customer is exempt from credit card fees.

The Result of this program will have four parts:

Result Part Description
Default The default result will have the final sellprice.
BaseMargin The base margin total.
Discounts The total discount applied, including coupons and other special discounts
CreditCard The Credit Card fee baked into the sellprice. 
for BaseMargin do
  add 15% of Cost
  add 1% of Cost if Category == "Higher Expense Items"
end
for Discounts do
  add CouponDiscount
  add 2.50 if AccountNumber in [100, 101, 102, 103]  /* Special Customers */
end
for CreditCard add 2% of (BaseMargin - Discounts) if PaymentTerms == "CreditCard" and not CCFeeExempt
set BaseMargin - Discounts + CreditCard