Gents,
this is a really interesting discussion and I wish I had more time
to participate.. I agree with Stephen that some constraints are
really worthy monitoring,
while others are simply "filters".. Wolfgang's mention of "near
misses" is potentially a hot topic, I have been experimenting with
"imperfect" rules which
are more robust in that sense and provide better traceability, but
that is not yet implemented in the core engine.
I would also point out that one thing is monitor constraints for
"logging" or "auditing" purposes, another is the ability to specify
different behaviours
(i.e. consequences) according to the success vs failure of an
evaluation.
To this end, and following on the "extending" rule thread, it has
actually been planned and partially implemented.. it's only an
experimental feature
(@Mario, any update/clarification?), so it's probably not well
documented. But I would point you to these links:
http://blog.athico.com/2012/09/conditional-branches-with-sub-blocks.html
https://community.jboss.org/wiki/BranchCEs
with the warning that it's still experimental and, while adopting
"familiar" keywords (if, then, else, switch), their semantics is
different from the
usual imperative language one, and in fact could enable some of the
"extend" capabilities that have been invoked in the last couple of
posts.
Best
Davide
On 01/30/2013 02:25 PM, Cotton, Ben wrote:
Ø
automatically
rename each rule "part" (being a single-condition rule
derived from the original) to some derivation of the
original rule name, and need the consequence only in the
fully-extended rule, thereby giving the same effect, but
with rule "parts" that would reflect failure at the
individual condition level
This is *exactly* the ambition we are
hoping that some Drools .DRL enrichment tool (or other
Drools capability) can provide.
Wish I had sufficient competency to comment on
the merits of your different suggested approaches. Hopeful
that the Drools gurus will comment explicitly on all these
approaches (and/or the approach suggested by another of
using Working Memory listeners).