EDQ Match Review - retrieving decisions without running the owning process

Question

We're running Dn:Director v8.1.2 (458) with Match Review.
We have a tiered set of match rules on two seperate sources of products, each level (set) controlled be a seperate process but all working from the same pair of staged data tables.
Depending on decisions made by the users inside each match review level, particular products may go up or down levels for the next pass.
The issue we have is that currently we have to run the process twice, once to retrieve the decisions and determine whether products are promoted/demoted, and then a second time to use these promotions/demotions to establish a refreshed match review for users.
Users do not process a whole level at a time (there might be 5000 products in a level each with any number of possible matches), nor is there any restriction on which levels are dealt with first - the conduct of the matching is entirely down to the users themselves.
Consequently it's not feasible to have a level completed before dealing with the decisions they've made, not to have the levels proccessed in sequence.
Each run of each process takes a fair time, so running each twice within a job is less than ideal.
Is there a means of retrieving the decisions & relationships that are sitting in a match review session without actually running the process that controls it ??
This way we could bring in the decisions & determine the promotion/demotion actions much quicker than by actually running the process.
My feeling (maybe completely wrong !!) is that this is possible using web services, but we've no experience of these and can't find any meaningful documentation on it.
Thanks in advance for anyone's help.

Answer 1

We think you could achieve what you want in a single match process... but doing the 'status' checking of a given main product record differently.
It would likely be a fairly significant change to what you have now, and would need proving/testing.
Brief description of the idea:
- Use a single match process with match rules in two tiers. Match rules in the Level 1 tier are only applied to records of status A ('Main Review'). Match rules in the level 2 tier are only applied to records of status B ('Deep Review'). Use an 'Is Value' comparison to apply the condition (if you do not have this from a solution installation, it can be provided as an extension).
- Records always start in status A (Main Revoew). However, if there is a 'No Match' decision made to a main record in the review it is moved to status B. The moving to status B occurs each time the process runs and uses the output of matching - the relationships output run through a Group and Merge processor to deduplicate it, making sure that any No Match decision is always retained. The output of matching is used to update a status tracking table for the record.
- Before the match process, perform a Lookup and Return against the status tracking table to work out the status of a given main record and tag the record with this status. This means that on subsequent run, a record may be 'demoted' to status B.
A wrinkle is how to maintain the status table correctly since if a record is demoted to status B it will no longer match on the previous match rule. The logic here will need to be either:
1. 'Update' (primary key replace) an external database table with the status of each record when it is either demoted from the first review or promoted from the second.
2. Append, with a date/time and always take the latest status record for a given main record.
Certainly veering into consultancy territory but pretty sure it is possible.
Mike