Book Image

Drools JBoss Rules 5.X Developer's Guide

By : Michal Bali
Book Image

Drools JBoss Rules 5.X Developer's Guide

By: Michal Bali

Overview of this book

<p>Writing business rules has always been a challenging task. Business rules tend to change often leading to a maintenance nightmare. This book shows you various ways to code your business rules using Drools, the open source Business Rules Management System.<br /><br />Drools JBoss Rules 5.X Developer's Guide shows various features of the Drools platform by walking the reader through several real-world examples. Each chapter elaborates on different aspects of the Drools platform. The reader will also learn about the inner workings of Drools and its implementation of the Rete algorithm.<br /><br />The book starts with explaining rule basics, then builds on this information by going through various areas like human readable rules, rules for validation, and stateful rules, using examples from the banking domain. A loan approval process example shows the use of the jBPM module. Parts of a banking fraud detection system are implemented with the Drools Fusion module which is the complex event processing part of Drools. Finally, more technical details are shown detailing the inner workings of Drools, the implementation of the ReteOO algorithm, indexing, node sharing, and partitioning.</p>
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Drools JBoss Rules 5.X Developer's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Setting Up the Development Environment
Creating Custom Operators
Dependencies of Sample Application
Index

Troubleshooting techniques


If we have trouble with writing a new rule or fixing a broken rule, we should first isolate this rule from others. It can be done by commenting out other rules or by extracting this rule to a new file and working there.

The Drools Eclipse plugin has the Rete Tree view. The Rete Tree view is accessible as the second tab of the DRL editor. It shows the graphical representation of the Rete network (more about it in Chapter 12, Learning about Performance). Behind the scenes, it compiles the .drl file and so can be used to quickly check if the .drl file is valid, and if the file is not valid, an error is displayed.

If the rule compiles, but it still isn't doing what we want, we can use a debug event listeners to see if the expected facts were inserted into the knowledge session, if the rule was actually activated, and if it was fired.

If the rule hasn't been activated, there might be an issue with the rule's conditions. In this case it helps to comment out some conditions...