Re: [rules-dev] Re: RuleFlow preview

Our implementation is a light layer to provide "wait states" for one or more rules, it uses a similar principle to agenda-groups (Clips modules) to partition the execution. Activated rules are placed in temporary buckets (rule-flow-groups), instead of onto the agenda, when the rule-flow-group is activated the bucket empties onto the Agenda for normal execution, when all the emptied rules are fired the next rule-flow-groups are activated. The system is still "parallel" in nature, in that the agenda is still responsible for executing rules and the agenda can have more than one rule on it at at time. In our implementation all the rules in the rule-flow-group will be put onto the agenda for execution, at the same time standard rules can also continue to be managed and executed by the agenda, and agenda groups (clips modules) still continue to operate - all in parallel. A rule that is specified to execute as part of a rule-flow-group can also be part of an agenda-group, but that use case is discouraged because it can get quite hairy unless you really know what you are doing :) As it means a rule-flow-group can be activated, the rules moved onto their respective agenda-groups, where any rules not in agenda-groups that do not have focus will not fire, the next rule-flow-group will not activate untill all rules for the current rule-flow-group have fired, regardless of the agenda-groups they are in. The limitation at the moment is that the temporary bucket has no ability to handle different start instances and differentiate between the rules in it's bucket of the same rule-flow, but you can have multiple different rule flows executing in parallel. We purposefuly kept it simple for "version 1" to build up the functionality needed for rule flow. The use cases for parallel execution of the same flow are not easy - as one instance can catch up and over take another instance on the same flow. Also if a rule in a rule-flow-group activates which of the two current instances for the same rule flow are responsible for firing it? The same issue arrises for when you have the same rule-flow-group in multiple rule-flows. We are currently not sure how best to handle these types of situations; maybe you could help us on those use cases? Or even provide a patch :) Mark Rich Halsey wrote: