Hi Mark

I went through the RuleAnalytics Module document. It looks like there is a good compatibility between your visions of Rule Analysis and our rule dependency generation work. I'll be excited to further develop and integrate my work with drools-verifier module code.

Just a short summary of how I had approached the problem:

We have long ruleflow which consists of other ruleflows, ruleflow groups, split conditions. Using drools API I was
able to traverse through the main ruleflow including (recursively) constituent nodes. So at any node I knew which rules
are relevant. Now, to find out dependency between rules I required very intricate information about any given rule. I could not
find sufficient drools APIs to get this information. There are methods to get LHS and RHS of a rule but they do not give information about individual attributes. For RHS its more worse. No textual information was availabe about it. (I am using 4.0.7 and I had even posted my questions on Drools user mailing list)

As a result, I wrote my own .drl file parser using javacc (which was very interesting to do) and got whatever information I required.
Now I knew which rule modifies which attribute (and of which class) and which rule uses what atrributes in its conditional part. Its much easier to get dependecy sequence now. I know a few cases where this approach might produce a false dependency sequence but using other rule-flow(salience, agenda) information can help us avoid that.

Now, how shall we go about it? I have installed irc on my system and I think I require some url to be able to connect to you guys.

Siddharth

On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 7:40 PM, Mark Proctor <mproctor@codehaus.org> wrote:

Drools 5.0 has the drools-verifier. This does a variety of verifications and analysis, like where class fields are used, gap analysis etc. The Guvnor BRMS can produce HTML reports for this information. Subsumption isn't done yet, we needed to analys the consequences for update/modify to try and detect potential impacted rules - this is also needed to detect which rules depend on other rules.
http://anonsvn.labs.jboss.com/labs/jbossrules/trunk/drools-verifier/
http://wiki.jboss.org/wiki/RuleAnalyticsModule

So we would love to have your work as additions to this, but it will need to be integrated with the existing drools-verifier module code and the HTML reporting - can you make that happen? It would be ideal, as it then means your code is part of the main project and will be maintained and improved by the community.

Maybe you could pop onto irc, and chat to us about it more?
http://www.jboss.org/drools/irc.html

Do you have any visualisation plans? If on the web GWT-Diagram is turning out to be a great tool
http://code.google.com/p/gwt-diagrams/

Mark

Sangrish wrote:

Hi

I have been using Drools Rules Engine in our application for past
couple of weeks.
One of the requirements in our project was to let a user (anyone who is
writing/analysing the rules) find out
what other rules a given rule depends upon. There were a few kinds of
dependencies:
1) Object Attribute dependency: The attributes of an object being used in
the conditional part of a rule
might be getting modified in the consequence part of another rule. We
wanted all such rules with each rule having its own dependency list.
2) Rule Salience based dependency. A rule having lower salience should be
executed only after a higher (if any) salience rule has already been
executed.
3) Dependency caused by a specific Rule flow. Rules in a ruleflow group
should be executed only if (if any) Split condition gets satisfied.
4) Agenda flow dependency (i.e., one agenda following another)
We could not find much support for this in the Drools API. Hence we
decided to write our own dependency generator. The tool we are writing
caters to first 3 dependencies. We might even handle the 4th one. Since Drools is open source, we thought of contributing our bit towards
its development. If the drools team wants I can happily work with them on
getting this functionality plugged in the Drools system.

Thanks
Siddharth

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