Re: [rules-users] Looking for guidance / approach to porting a question graph to Drools

wrote:

Hi Making no bones about it, this is a broad topic request and I've got little hands-on Drools experience, just looking for some pointers on a potential Drools approach, feedback appreciated. Background: We have a system which asks online users questions to diagnose an issue (the problem domain isn't important right now). The questions are structured in a tree/graph such that one question leads to another until a conclusion - not exactly rocketscience to this list I suspect! Any question will have n outputs (defined in configuration); each output is mapped to an option in an HTML select/radio button. The key issue though is that this question flow is all running in the browser, by reading in an XML configuration and parsing this in javascript. Instead I need this executing server side, i.e. in a rule engine. One reason is that increasingly questions are being automated - currently we make an ajax call which decides upon the outcome to select and therefore move onto the next. This is however a little clunky at present. I see Drools as a potential execution engine for our reworked system, running rules until needing a manual question to be asked, and triggering question display in a page. Upon the answer the flow continues in that fashion until a conclusion is reached. Specific queries: We have a legacy stack of question flows, how to adapt them into a syntax amenable to Drools? Can I do this at runtime? ( Our question graphs could be accessed via database access or in an XML format ) Given many questions have >2 outcomes, I assume each question-answer permutation would be a rule? Does every question have to be mapped to a bean to become a fact to operate on? Given our questions are of a few broad types (boolean,numeric,select one) is that all I need to model? In our current setup a user could decide to re-answer an earlier question and therefore take an alternate route. What would be the equivalent in Drools? If this is viable, will I need 1 rule outcome to pose a question and another to operate on the outcome, i.e. will the rules fire up to/including the decision to ask a question, then when an answer fact is injected into working memory the rules will fire from that point onwards? Thanks A:E _______________________________________________ rules-users mailing list rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users