Ronald,

   Last week I wrote the docs for TypeDeclaration. So, you may try the docs first hand and provide me feedback! ;)

https://hudson.jboss.org/hudson/job/drools/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/trunk/target/docs/drools-expert/html/ch06.html#d0e3047

   The API was promoted from drools-core to drools-api after M5 was released, so you need trunk to use it.

https://hudson.jboss.org/hudson/job/drools/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/trunk/target/

   Regarding your questions, I believe this is probably the easiest way of doing it, but not the only one. Just to mention another way would be to generate a JAXB domain model from your database and upload it as a jar to Guvnor.

   If you want to dive into Drools internals and see how the classes are generated, take a look at org.drools.factmodel.ClassDefinition in drools-core as your starting point. From there you can navigate through the code searching for the references. IMO though, you don't need to go down this route.

   Regarding the pipeline, if you want to customize it for your needs, you just need to create an intermediate step or use smooks to map from one model into the other. I think mark did not added a step to map from an external model into a type declared model yet. Contributions welcome.

   Hope this helps,
        Edson



2009/2/6 Ronald Brindl <rbrindl@thegoldensource.com>
Referring to threads
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.drools.devel/2860
       Dynamic Facts: how to get jar wih Facts declared in drl
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.drools.devel/2595
       TypeDeclaration plugin heirarchy

I am just in the process of evaluating the possibilities of using Drools.

Our use case is the following:
We have a dynamic metamodel, which gets generated from database during
application initialisation phase.  Then a runtime model gets instantiated,
which is fed from incoming messages (files, jms, etc.)
Both models are highly generic, basically maps of maps (lists of lists, for
model instances)

Now, i would like to publish the metamodel to Guvnor as fact model, so that
business rules users can use it there and define

In the last 2 days i dived into the sources, read the mailing list entries
above, documentation and so on, but i still don't have a clear vision on
how to accomplish that.

Our first approach was to use TypeDeclaration, i.e. to dynamically create
DRL that defines the fact types as defined in our metamodel, but i don't
have a clue on how to assert data for those types, since i don't have the
resulting java classes available in Java.
(There was also some confusion: in the documentation (M5) it says, bytecode
is generated for declaratively defined Facts, but i could not find anything
in the code, where this byte code is generated)

Our next approach was to generate interfaces as Fact types and create
proxies to access the data. This would also allow us to implement another
use case, that demands access to messages already stored in the database
with the same id as the incoming messages, and compare what fields are new
and to provide merging of new and old data.

I also had a quick look at the new Pipeline concept, but as far as i
understand that, it builds on a statically defined FactModel.

Then i dived a little bit more into the code and saw code generation for
accessing Java class facts, which also might be a reasonable solution for
us.

However, what i was asking myself was, if there is some entry point for
functionality like that, some existing API.

Thank you,
ron.


--
Ronald Brindl
Sr. Software Developer
Member of Architecture Team
The Goldensource Corporation

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 Edson Tirelli
 JBoss Drools Core Development
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