[rules-users] Looking for guidance / approach to porting a question graph to Drools

[Ross H]

This might be of interest:
http://blog.athico.com/2009/06/introducing-new-smart-forms-tool-drools.html

Currently in the process of being released into open source and an
announcement should be made in a few weeks.

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 8:49 AM, tim fulcher <against.entropy at googlemail.com
> wrote:

> Hi
>
> Making no bones about it, this is a broad topic request and I've got
> little hands-on Drools experience, just looking for some pointers on a
> potential Drools approach, feedback appreciated.
>
> Background:
> We have a system which asks online users questions to diagnose an
> issue (the problem domain isn't important right now).
> The questions are structured in a tree/graph such that one question
> leads to another until a conclusion - not exactly rocketscience to
> this list I suspect! Any question will have n outputs (defined in
> configuration); each output is mapped to an option in an HTML
> select/radio button.
>
> The key issue though is that this question flow is all running in the
> browser, by reading in an XML configuration and parsing this in
> javascript. Instead I need this executing server side, i.e. in a rule
> engine. One reason is that increasingly questions are being automated
> - currently we make an ajax call which decides upon the outcome to
> select and therefore move onto the next. This is however a little
> clunky at present.
>
> I see Drools as a potential execution engine for our reworked system,
> running rules until needing a manual question to be asked, and
> triggering question display in a page. Upon the answer the flow
> continues in that fashion until a conclusion is reached.
>
> Specific queries:
>
> We have a legacy stack of question flows, how to adapt them into a
> syntax amenable to Drools? Can I do this at runtime?
> ( Our question graphs could be accessed via database access or in an
> XML format )
>
> Given many questions have >2 outcomes, I assume each question-answer
> permutation would be a rule?
>
> Does every question have to be mapped to a bean to become a fact to
> operate on? Given our questions are of a few broad types
> (boolean,numeric,select one) is that all I need to model?
>
> In our current setup a user could decide to re-answer an earlier
> question and therefore take an alternate route. What would be the
> equivalent in Drools?
>
> If this is viable, will I need 1 rule outcome to pose a question and
> another to operate on the outcome, i.e. will the rules fire up
> to/including the decision to ask a question, then when an answer fact
> is injected into working memory the rules will fire from that point
> onwards?
>
>
> Thanks
>
> A:E
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