Re: [rules-users] Request user feedback during rules execution

Katerina, I will give you my personal opinion, and it is important that you understand that it is not based in any literature or others experience. Just my own professional experience. While it is possible to do that in the RHS of a rule, I would not do it. The main reason for that is that it would make everything more difficult to develop/test/maintain. You would increase the coupling between your system's components and decrease their flexibility. When designing my own systems, I tend to specialize components with well defined roles. When working with rules, I usually let rules take the decisions, but let other specific component react to those decisions (in this case, manage the flow of the application). I think about the rules engine as a "service" in a SOA architecture (if you prefer to think like that), in a way that if more information from the user is needed, what the rules will do is to answer to the service call "saying: 'more information needed". The real controller component (the one that manages the application flow) will understand that message and ask the user for more info. Once the user adds the info, the controller asserts new info into the working memory and fire rules again (or call the service again, if you prefer). The advantages for me in such approach is that a small application can use such "rules service" with a house made controller and do fine with it, but if you need to leverage that controller for something more complex like managing a workflow or business process, you can replace it for a BPM engine (like jBPM) and your rules will never notice (better decoupling). Also it becomes really easy to implement unit tests over your rules, while if you increase coupling with GUI components, you would need to start creating mocks for testing your rules. So, my answer is model your rules component as a passive service and have a controller to be the active flow manager. Hope it helps. []s Edson kchantzara(a)costamare.com wrote: -- Edson Tirelli Software Engineer - JBoss Rules Core Developer Office: +55 11 3124-6000 Mobile: +55 11 9218-4151 JBoss, a division of Red Hat @ www.jboss.com