Alex, please don't take this to be picking on you; this is more a post to everyone whom reads these forums.
You are not writing procedural, object-oriented, or functional code. You are writing rules to look for patterns of objects. If everything is done in an eval you are losing the majority of the benefits of using a rule engine, e.g node sharing, indexing, etc. Flesh out your object model. Assert all of your objects into Working Memory. This will allow you to reason over anything without using evals.
OK -- rant off --
Alex, you may want to try and refactor your model to be more "rules friendly". That way your could write rules more like the following.
when
$f : Fact()
Detail(name == "END_SET", value == true)
Detail(name == "SET", value = 1)
Detail(name == "PLAYER1_SCORE", $score1 : value)
Detail(name == "PLAYER2_SCORE', value < $score1)
Thanks for replying.
rule "Player 1 wins first set "
when
$f : Fact()
eval ($f.getDetails().get("END_SET").toString() == "true" && Integer.valueOf($f.getDetails().get("SET").toString()) == 1 && Integer.valueOf($f.getDetails().get("PLAYER1_SCORE").toString()) > Integer.valueOf($f.getDetails().get("PLAYER2_SCORE").toString()))
then
//then settle selection;
end
this rules runs perfectly as long as the hashmap contained in the ‘fact’ object has all the required keys and their values are not null. For the time being I have just changed any null values to a value of ‘DEFAULT’ but it would be preferable to be able to look for f.getDetails().get("END_SET") (for example) knowing that the engine that sent it might not be in an end_set state so may not have added that key.
That example is very basic but as I create more rules for more sports it could become very cumbersome to have to ensure that every key referenced in the rules is in the hashmap each time!
Alex
From: rules-dev-bounces@lists.jboss.org [mailto:rules-dev-bounces@lists.jboss.org] On Behalf Of David Sinclair
Sent: 24 February 2009 17:27
To: Rules Dev List
Subject: Re: [rules-dev] Dealing with null pointer exceptions thrown by parsing rules
I understand what you are saying Alex, but could you post an example rule to see exactly how you are doing it? It may be that you could simply rewrite the rule so you don't get the NPE.
On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 4:24 AM, Zevenbergen, Alex <azevenbergen@paddypower.com> wrote:
Hi all,
I have started writing my rules packages and so have had a decent amount of success. However all my rules are based on value pairs from a hashmap object that is contained within my fact object. This approach works fine if the parameter the rule is looking for is in the map and has a value.
But I will need to be able to pass null values to the rules (and expect them to just not fire any rule that looks for that param), however this always throws a null pointer exception.
So my question is: Is there any mechanism to deal with this in drools.
Simply setting all nulls to a default value isn’t preferable in this situation as the app is going to be used by several different sources and has to be able to take in many different types of info.
Thanking you,
Alex
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