Making enterprise (and other) applications more configurable has been one of the pursuits in many of my past projects. The extra effort to open up enterprise applications for enhanced adaptability surely pays back the extra investment. Of course, one may go to the other extreme and end up in over-engineering. So the challenge is somewhere in between hard-coding and decoupling what’s in code and what needs to go via configuration. One aspect is about having an idea or even a vision of what can and might change in the future. Yet, even if we have a good idea of what might change in the future it’s in many cases not trivial to make things configurable, simply because configurations don’t always fit in basic parameter settings.
The use of arithmetic or logical expressions, also called formulas, is an interesting way to push the adaptability of a business application beyond simple parameter configurations.
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