[rules-users] Somewhat strange question: Rules without a RHS

[Joe Ammann]

Hi all

I have an ongoing discussion with my users: They have been using several
home-grown rule oriented applications for years. Almost all of these
"rule engines" were built for one very specific reason, and the users
have come accustomed to just specify a LHS of a rule. They never needed
to specify a RHS, because the action of the rule was pre-determined by
the application. So when the rule fired, it was clear what needed to be
done in the application.

Now want to merge all these "rule engines" onto Drools (5.4.0), and use
the Guvnor BRL editor and DSLs to actually formulate them. Of course now
Drools can not "know" what the RHS is supposed to be, since we have
"merged" several applications. The users now need to select one of
several predefined DSL statements as the RHS, but unfortunately they
consistenly keep forgetting to put an RHS at all. Guvnor validates this
successfully but of course the rules then fail to work.

I have been thinking if there is any way in Guvnor or via some kind of
Drools expert mechanism to say something like "if a rule is in packaga
a.b.c, it's RHS should always be 'foo' unless specified otherwise". To
be honest, I could not come up with a way to achieve this and think just
need to educate my users better. But before doing that, I thought I'd
use the wisdom of this group :-)

-- 
CU, Joe