[rules-users] Cannot invoke method because of ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException

[Bojan Janisch]

Hello Guys,

sorry to bother you with this problem, but I'm out of ideas.
I'm using Drools in textmining-context and in basic I have
a function that checks 2 named entites for equality to 
ensure that the entities are all different and that the rules 
do work only on different named entity objects:

public static boolean isEqual(Annotation a, Annotation b){
if(a.equals(b)){
   return true;
}
	
return false;
}

Sometimes there are conditions that need tests of more than 
2 named entites. For this I've written a super method that
calls the isEqual method in a loop:

public static boolean isEqual(Annotation... a){
ArrayList<Annotation> outLoop = new ArrayList<Annotation>(Arrays.asList(a));
ArrayList<Annotation> inLoop = new ArrayList<Annotation>(Arrays.asList(a));
		
for (Annotation anno1 : outLoop) {
   inLoop.remove(anno1);
   for (Annotation anno2 : inLoop) {
      if(isEqual(anno1,anno2)){
      return true;
      }
   }
}

return false;
}


My rules could (theoretically) now call the function 
eval(isEqual($ne1,$ne2)) or
eval(isEqual($ne1,$ne2,$ne3) or even
eval(isEqual($ne1,$ne2,$ne3,$ne4,$ne5)) and so on.

So there starts my problem:

Each time I'm getting an ArrayIndexOutOfBounds Exception from the second 
method that looks like this:

java.lang.RuntimeException: cannot invoke method: isEqual
        ...
	at java.lang.Thread.dispatchUncaughtException(Thread.java:1888)
Caused by: java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 3
	at org.mvel2.optimizers.impl.refl.nodes.MethodAccessor.executeAll(MethodAccessor.java:149)
	at org.mvel2.optimizers.impl.refl.nodes.MethodAccessor.getValue(MethodAccessor.java:48)
	at org.mvel2.ast.ASTNode.getReducedValueAccelerated(ASTNode.java:108)
	at org.mvel2.compiler.ExecutableAccessor.getValue(ExecutableAccessor.java:38)
        ...

Could someone explain me what's wrong with my code? Thanks for any help.

Greetings
JB