Are AME Rules combined as an ‘AND’ or an ‘OR’ clause?

A friend of mine recently asked this question and I thought it might make a good post. The question was, How does AME behave when you have setup multiples rules for a transaction type. How does the end approval hierarchy look in such a scenario and how do you control it.

In such cases the result depends on whether the various rules that you have configured are mutually exclusive or if more than one rule can be true for an transaction. For any transaction, AME evaluates all rules defined in the functional area and merges the out of all rules into a final approver lists according to an preset rule. So the answer to the question is that the rules will result in an AND. However, if the rules have conditions which ensures that only one rule applies for an transaction then the output results in an OR.

Many a time, you would need to code complicated attributes to achieve the OR conditions. Well if design the rules carefully the desired output can be achieved by using the Priority Processing Mode. AME allows you to define relative or absolute priorities for each of the rules. When the rules are evaluated, AME automatically collapses the rule as per priority settings and generates the end approval hierarchy as per your requirement.