So far in our examples, we've been changing our master data as and when we wish. In the real world, this would be much more controlled with security, and might even require approval from a business owner or stakeholder before the change is accepted.

MDS business rules can help with this scenario, as, with a bit of creativity, it's possible to use attributes, business rules, and notifications to create a simple workflow. Essentially we would create an additional attribute, called "MemberStatus", that relevant users can change to Approved or Rejected. If we check for a condition of "MemberStatus = Rejected", then we can have an Is Invalid validation action that we know from the previous section will cause a notification to be sent.

There is a good blog post on how to configure basic workflow in this way at the following address: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/mds_team/archive/2010/02/15/enabling-human-workflow-part-1-changing-your-model.aspx.

While the business rules and notifications...