Hello,

I am a new Drools user working my way through the examples.  To test my understanding of how the rules work, I modified the StateExampleUsingSalience.drl file used in the StateExampleWithDynamicRules example.  The result of my change conflicted with my understanding of how the rules should work.

I made two modifications in the StateExampleUsingSalience.drl file.  The two modifications (shown below) are the commenting out of the two lines in the RHS portion of the “B to D” rule.  My understanding of how this would affect the result was:  because the “D” State object never changes state to “State.FINISHED” the RHS portion of the “D to E” rule (shown below) would not execute because the first pattern in the LHS would fail to find a State object in working memory that met the criteria of the constraint groups defined within it.

My question is:  Why does the “D to E” rule in the StateExampleDynamicRules.drl execute the statements in the RHS portion of the rule?

From StateExampleUsingSalience.drl:  My changes in this file are the two lines commented out in the RHS portion.

rule "B to D"

when

            State(name == "B", state == State.FINISHED )               

            d : State(name == "D", state == State.NOTRUN )

then

//System.out.println(d.getName() + " finished" );

//d.setState( State.FINISHED );

end

From StateExampleDynamicRules.drl:  This is the rule where I expected the RHS portion to NOT get executed because there aren’t any State objects in working memory that have their name == “D” and its state == State.FINISHED because the setState( State.FINISHED ) was never executed on the “D” state object.

rule "D to E"

when

            State(name == "D", state == State.FINISHED )               

            e : State(name == "E", state == State.NOTRUN )

then

            System.out.println(e.getName() + " finished" );

            e.setState( State.FINISHED );

end

After my modifications, the output was:

A finished

B finished

C finished

E finished

I did not expect the “E finished” message to be printed.

Regards,

Daren