Hello all, In my use case, I am planning on using decision tables to implement rules that contain product information (product attributes - like product grade, product style etc). I've managed to put together the spreadsheet and have been successful in generating different set of rules (using rule templates) from this spreadsheet. The spreadsheet with contain basic product information that product fact will be matched against. e.g. The spreadsheet will contain columns of product grade and product styles that when translated into rules, the LHS would look something like Product ( grade == "010", style == "515" ) Where the '010' and '515' would come from a spreadsheet (decision table) that the user's provide. Now here's the challenge. I need to also provide a means for the user to validate the "010" and "515". The available product grade and styles are available in a database table. So I should be able to use that to build second set of rules (templates). So I'm thinking, if there's a way to convert the user supplied spreadsheet and make it a table of 'facts' of the validation rules, I should be able to verify the value "010" "515" against the database. Is that the best way to go about this ? If so, can someone please point me to a way to load facts from a spreadsheet ? I have looked around and found that there is a jxls project that allows loading of JavaBeans from values in spreadsheet. But it requires xml files to be configured. I really like the way rule templates work (by simply state substitution variables in the template itself - thereby avoiding the whole need to configuration xml files). I think if there's a way to load facts using templates from a spreadsheet, I should be able to use that concept to validate the values in my rules. So is it possible to do the above ? Also is there a better way ? Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks in advance, Gurvinder -- View this message in context: http://drools-java-rules-engine.46999.n3.nabble.com/How-to-validate-liter... Sent from the Drools - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ rules-users mailing list rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users

Manstis, You are correct. There are parameters that users will provide in the spreadsheet that I need to validate. Actually there will be one spreadsheet. It's going to serve 2 purposes. Provide a decision table AND also be a container of data for a few Rule Templates. The concept is that if a product does not match any criteria on the spreadsheet, then the next step is to extract the data from the spreadsheet and create rules where the match would be more 'generic'. So I'm planning to use the decision table to deduce the more 'generic matching conditions'. In both cases, I need to be able to validate the parameters in the spreadsheet against values in a data table. Taking my earlier example - The user might provide product attributes - e.g. product number ABC510 in the spreadsheet. I have to ensure that the ABC510 is a valid product number before I can allow the spreadsheet to be used as the source of my rules (the actual rules will determine the price that will be charged for the product). I'll be able to easily create a new set of rules to validate the product information against the data table we have. That should not pose a major problem. The question is how to easily convert the spreadsheet into an arraylist of facts that I can insert into this rule set. I know I can 'program' this manually using POI etc. I'm looking to see if there's a less fragile way to load the spreadsheet as facts ? If there is a quicker way, I'd love to hear about it. Hope that makes more sense and is a little clearer than mud :). -- View this message in context: http://drools-java-rules-engine.46999.n3.nabble.com/How-to-validate-liter... Sent from the Drools - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ rules-users mailing list rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users