Thanks, everyone, for your insightful responses. You've made my day... Tom Murphy Business Process Consultant Wells Fargo HCFG - CORE Deal Decisioning Platform 800 S. Jordan Creek Parkway | West Des Moines, IA 50266 MAC: X2301-01B Office: 515 324 4853 | Mobile: 941 320 8014 This message may contain confidential and/or privileged information.  If you are not the addressee or authorized to receive this for the addressee, you must not use, copy, disclose, or take any action based on this message or any information herein.  If you have received this message in error, please advise the sender immediately by reply e-mail and delete this message.  Thank you for your cooperation. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2009 09:55:37 +0100 From: Wolfgang Laun <wolfgang.laun(a)gmail.com&gt; Subject: Re: [rules-users] Help needed - Problems with forall operator To: Rules Users List <rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org&gt;, ed.tirelli(a)gmail.com Message-ID: <17de7ee80911070055k2469051agfebf3a5be24c7165(a)mail.gmail.com&gt; Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Here's the explanation why Tom's version does not work. The first pattern of a "forall" defines the domain, which is: all CreditReport facts; for each object in this domain, the remaining patterns must match; since the FICO pattern merely ascertains the existence of a single FICO chained to a parent CreditReport with validScoreIndicator false, it fires as soon as there is one for each of the existing CreditReports. Jared's solution has the CreditReport CE in front of the forall, unadorned with any quantifier, and the innate behavior of Drools makes sure that the hole thing will be tried, once, for any existing CreditReport anyway. Then, the forall domain is now FICOs with that CR's id and valid == false - but what is the CE? I guess that Drool's behavior is somewhat off the definition, using just FICO() - i.e., all existing FICO objects - as the domain. (However, I think that Edson changed this recently for 5.1.0.) Thus, Jared's rule indeed fires only when all FICOs are linked to the CreditReport are false, but it fails to do so as soon as there is at least one other FICO with either a different parent, or valid. Therefore, to be on the safe side with multiple CreditReport facts and assorted FICO's being in WM at the same time, I propose this rule: rule "somerule2" when report: CreditReport( $parentCreditReport_1_Id : myId) forall ( $f : FICO( parentId == $parentCreditReport_1_Id ) FICO( this == $f, validScoreIndicator == false) ) then System.out.println("somerule2 fired on " + $parentCreditReport_1_Id ); end Here, the domain is explicitly given as all FICOs of the current CR; and for all of them valid must be false. Still, this solution is not perfect: It would also fire in the absence of any FICO for some CR. To fix this, add a guard against there being no FICOs for the current CR: report: CreditReport( $parentCreditReport_1_Id : myId) exists FICO( parentId == $parentCreditReport_1_Id ) forall ( $f : FICO( parentId == $parentCreditReport_1_Id ) FICO( this == $f, validScoreIndicator == false) ) To complete the picture, one might equally well use the negation of forall, which would have to be propagated into the predicate (read '|' as "so that"): forall x in D | P(x) => not existst x in D | not P(x) Now the condition delimiting the domain and the negated predicate can be merged again into one CE: rule "somerule3" when report: CreditReport( $parentCreditReport_1_Id : myId) exists FiCo( parentId == $parentCreditReport_1_Id ) not ( exists FiCo( parentId == $parentCreditReport_1_Id, validScore == true) ) then System.out.println("somerule3 fired on " + $parentCreditReport_1_Id ); end -W On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 9:45 PM, Jared Davis <sunray(a)davisprogramming.com&gt;wrote: