Hi All,

 

I wanted to throw to discussion a feature that might be good in Drools. I am basically trying to model a formula evaluator in a decision table. The idea being that a business user directly defines formulas(without having to use Guided Editors in the BRMS or Eclipse, as business users love Excel more than anything else..;)).

 

The thing I am trying to do is the following:

 

Condition                                      Action

T:FormulaFact

formulaName                        int salary=t.getSalary();

                                               t.setBenefit($1);

 

 

Formula1                          salary * 100

Formula2                        salary * 1000

 

Everything runs great as Excel simply substitutes the entered string into the function. The problem I face is when I write something like this:

 

Formula3                        min(salary,100)

 

 

The ”,”  here is treated as the delimited of a parameter. So the compiled DRL does not set the string correctly. It would make a rule like

Rule FormulaTable_123

When

T: FormulaFact(formulaName=”Formula1”)

Then

int salary=t.getSalary();

t.setBenefit(min(salary); //Since the  words after the , become part of $2 which is not defined.

End

 

 

Is there any-way to declaratively change the Decision Table Parser to not use , for delimiting between parameters and use some other character.

 

I could always write the DT using my character, then compile the DT into DRL and replace my character with ,(I am thinking of using “Colon”), but would it be a good idea to have an Excel or  a Property File that can be read by the SpreadSheetCompiler to change the delimited character used by the Parser.

 

Cheers,

Vikrant