Objectives

An objective is something "delivered" by a product delivery case to a particular target. Commonly an objective is a payment of some kind of benefit or allowance paid to a client, but an objective could also be (for example) an amount to bill, or a non-monetary outcome such as a recommendation to the client.

The Engine has separate concepts for:

• the types of objective supported by your product, e.g. your product supports the concept of a personal benefit allowance; each type of objective defines its name and other fixed data such as the type of client that it targets; vs.
• an instance of an objective on a particular product delivery case, e.g. on case 123 for your product, claimant John Smith is entitled to personal benefit allowance from 1st Jan 2011 until 15th Feb 2011; each objective instance describes the particular target to deliver to and the period(s) for which that target is entitled to the objective.

On any given day in the case's lifetime, if the case is eligible then the case is either entitled or not entitled to any particular objective instance. Equivalently, we say that an objective instance was attained or not attained on that day.

The rule classes for objective types and instances described later in this section show the full details available.