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What is Limit Buffer By, when creating rules?

Environment:

Business Rules
Oracle B2C Service

Resolution:

The "limit buffer by" option appears when you create a rule that compares a string to any of the following:

• Incident Customer Thread
• Incident Staff Thread
• Incident Proposed Response
• Incident Summary

This buffer allows you to specify, if desired, the number of characters in the thread, response or summary to compare against. If no value is entered, the entire thread is compared. If a value is entered, the first characters of the most recent entries will be used. 

For example, let us say we have an incident as outlined below:

Customer: Hello, I have a question about dogs.
Staff: Thank you for your question. What breed?
Customer: Doberman.

If a rule was created and compared to the string "hello" in the Customer Thread and no buffer limit was specified, the rule will look for "hello" in the entire incident, will evaluate to true, and the 'Then' portion of the rule will execute. 

If a buffer limit of 5 is specified, the rule will look for "hello" only in the first 5 characters, which is "Dober," will evaluate to false, and the 'Else' portion of the rule will execute.

If a buffer limit of 15 is specified, the rule will look for "hello" in "Doberman. Hello" will evaluate to true and the Then portion of the rule executes.  The system does count punctuation and spaces in its comparison as part of the buffer. 

The maximum value accepted for the limit is 4000.  Also, if the limit is comparing multiple threads a character separator is used in between each thread processed and that counts as a space.  

This option is useful if you want to disregard the initial information in a thread, for example if the initial information is standard text, or for any other reason you wish to look at only the most recent information in a thread.

Note: Please consider HTML usage. All HTML markup will be included in the buffer size.