Using business rules in the Document Designer

Business rules allow you to display or hide elements on a document based on certain conditions. This allows you to print different variants of a document from a single document design. For example, you can use business rules to:

• Display a coloured dot that identifies which Registrant Type the registrant is. You can accomplish this by placing multiple, overlapping, coloured ellipse shapes on your badge design, and then adding business rules that cause different ellipses to be hidden or displayed if the visitor has a particular Registration Type.
• Display the registrant’s answer to a question that could be of interest to exhibitors, such as which industry they are in. You can accomplish this by adding a text element that contains a reference to a dynamic field (see Dynamic Fields).

You can add a business rule to an element by simply selecting it on the canvas and then clicking in the Rules section of the side menu. This will open a pop-up window in which you can set conditions and operations for the rule. Note that you can apply an existing rule to more than one element by first selecting an element and then selecting the checkbox for the rule. This is explained in Add a business rule to an element.

As you add more and more elements with business rules, your document design will decreasingly resemble the final document that actually comes out of the printer. It is therefore good to know that you can preview the final document based on different registrants’ details by clicking Save & Preview. This opens a pop-up window with a list of registrants in which you can simply select a registrant to preview the final product.