[rules-users] Rule Inheritance support

[Kunal Shah]

Hello list. I needed some expert advice related to implementing Rule
inheritance in Drools. I will still consider myself new to Drools and
trying to go through all the source code currently.

 

The requirement for rule inheritance that I have is as follows:

 

A set of rules are defined/implemented on an entity acting as a template
for other entities. Any entity created using template entity will
inherit rules defined in template. There may be hundreds of child
entities created from parent template entity. Inheritance here supports
the following:

1. All enabled rules from template are also enabled on child entity.

2. Child entity can over-ride one or more of the rules defined in
template. Child entity may also change rule settings/disable them.

3. Child entity can also extend rule-base by adding its own rules which
are not defined in template.

 

I know there has been mentioned in the list of not having support for
rule inheritance in Drools yet, but no discussion of how to achieve it.
So any insights will be greatly appreciated. 

 

Also one of the design questions here is should we use separate
rule-base for each child entity as well as template entity (there can be
potentially hundreds of child entities for a given template) or should
we try to use only one rule-base and provide support for inheritance
using only custom agenda filtering. Usage of custom agenda filter may
help with performance as it won't require hundreds of rule-bases but may
not be even feasible to what we are trying to accomplish here. Also it
may result in other short-comings but I can't visualize it just yet. 

 

Thanks

 

 

Kunal Shah 
Development 

www.sensorlogic.com 

 

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