I have, at long last, overcome my disinclination against spreadsheets and played around a bit.
As one of the incentives (perhaps the main one) for this kind of rule authoring appears to be a "syntax" cushioning by spreadsheet entries, I feel that additional simplifications might be appreciated. Therefore, I have modified some classes in org.drools.decisiontable.parser, to achieve the following, in the area of RuleSet entries:
- All entries are now repeatable, either by adding more cells to the right of "import" than just one (with a comma-separated list) or by writing more that one "Import" row.
- Same for "Variables", "Functions" and "Queries".
- All tags ("Import",...) are case insensitive and immune against leading and trailing spaces.
- Some user errors don't cause NPE; they throw an exception with an explanatory message
Opinions, please, and should I just release this, or would someone care to have a look and test it?
-W