I think I get the point to some extent. Let me restate what I am trying to do so that I am not missing anything here.
I myself understand the concept of controlling the rule execution order using various attributes like agenda-group, salience, etc. But there is a section of audience I am trying to address who do not understand these Drools concepts at all but they now java. They can get some clue on each individual rule definition but not the sequencing part. They do not want to learn Drools! But they want to at least modify these rule definitions by adding more conditional validations or even define new rules and link with the existing rules. This is where I thought a UI visualization tool which can parse these rule definitions and draw all possible execution orders might help.
On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 12:42 AM, Davide Sottara
<dsotty@gmail.com> wrote:
I think that Mario Fusco is working on a metadata framework, a set of API
that will allow to expose information about the rules. With that, it will be
possible to build something like what you mentioned. Unfortunately, the
problem is not as simple as one might think: as Wolfgang pointed out, too,
there is no unique way to transform a set of rules into a graph. You may
want a graph of the partial rule ordering induced by salience, but that
won't help too much at runtime (for that, you may prefer a snapshot of the
activations in the agenda). You may want a dependency graph of the rules, to
see which one may insert (retract) facts relevant for the activation of
another. You may even want a better graphical representation of the RETE
network, to see where sharing kicks in. We are also planning to unify and
improve the concept of *-group, so you may want to see the ordering and
dependencies between the groups themselves.
This is work in progress even now, any suggestion, more detailed requirement
or contribution will be welcome and might speed up the implementation
process.
Of course, if you take the suggestion of writing your own workflow to
control the rule flow, you can work around the issue, as you would be the
one imposing the ordering precisely :)
Best
Davide
Final remark: DRL rules are compiled in a RETE, which is a graph. So,
although VERY fine-grained, it could be possible to view a DRL file as a
graph, as well as authoring the "rules" graphically, by composing the RETE
manually. There should be some rule editor+engine which takes this approach
in the market, but of course this would be appropriate for very small scale
rule projects.
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