Thanks for your quick response, but I am still confused.
An activation-group assures that only one rule in the group will fire (an XOR
group)
Salience controls the order of evaluation
No salience controls the order of the
activations firing.
There is no ordering of evaluating rules because rules aren't evaluated.
Instead the rules clauses are transposed into a RETE graph which evaluates each clause as
the necessary data is available.
If two rules share a clause then they may share a node in the RETE graph.
The regular expression test has the higher salience and will trigger
if it is a bad
number ... so why is the other rule even being tested?
The RETE graph is evaluated
as deeply as possible in order to produce the current list of possible activations.
The activations are then sorted by salience and filtered by agenda-group. The top of the
list is taken and fired.
If any other pending activations have the same activation-group those pending activations
are then removed.
(It's a lot more complicated than that as you have things such as lock on active,
no-loop, etc but it hopefully
makes it make a little more sense.
In the mean time I will re-write the underWritingClassAsInt method to deal
with a bad number ... but this seems wrong to me.
Or do the check for both parts in
both rules , or use inheritance, but the easiest way would probably be to just have it
return null if the number isn't valid - at least if you are just doing in
comparisons.
Thomas
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