The context in which a rule is created and the object type associated with the rule determine which objects are affected by the rule. To better understand how rules work, the discussion can be broken into two areas:

Rules do not replace other rules, but all rules that apply are merged to create a composite rule.

The related topics listed below describe the details about object type and context rule usage, and details about the merging that takes place to generate the composite rule that is then applied to a specific object.