[rules-users] Trapping runaway rules

[Dean Whisnant]

My project involves rule creation by customers, business analysts, and developers.  We have a base set of rules that fire for every transaction and then we fire custom rules within a stateful session.  An issue I've started to run into is rules being created that fire endlessly.  I initialize the session with an event listener that we use to extract all rules fired for each line item of a transaction.  Once the session is initialized and all rules from various agenda groups loaded we do a fireall rules.

My questions are:
1) how can I detect I have a runaway rule/rules.
	Is there a method or listener that could detect this for me?  Does anyone have a formula they use to do so?  I had thought that I could use my event listener that I track the rules with to grab the last X number of rules fires and see if rule y gets fired more that z times.  But is there a simpler method?

2) once I've detected a runaway rule, how can I gracefully stop drools rule execution? I read of the command drools.halt in different posts, but not sure if this would be what I'm looking at doing.


Any thoughts are appreciated.

Thank you!

Dean
		StatefulKnowledgeSession ksession = buildOutgoingStatefulKnowledgeSession(supportingUDTList);
		// AgendaEventListener agendaListener = new HipaaAgendaListener();
		ksession.addEventListener(_ruleLog);

		for (int i = 0; i < _agendaGroups.size(); i++)
		{
			if (_log.isDebugEnabled()) _log.debug("Focus on Agenda Group " + _agendaGroups.get(i));
			ksession.getAgenda().getAgendaGroup(_agendaGroups.get(i)).setFocus();
			// Fire them all
			try
			{
				ksession.fireAllRules();
			}
			catch (Exception e)
			{
				_log.error("FireAllRules exception. Error=" + e.getMessage()); // error
			}
		}