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

The decision tables


The decision tables are another form of human-readable rules that is useful when there are lots of similar rules with different values. Rules that share the same conditions with different parameters can be captured in a decision table. Decision tables can be represented in an Excel spreadsheet (the .xls file) or a comma-separated value (the .csv file) format. Starting from Version 5.0, Drools supports web-based decision tables as well. They won't be discussed in this book; however, they are very similar. Let's look at a simple decision table in the .xls format.

Figure 4: Example decision table in validation.xls opened with the OpenOffice Calc editor

The screenshot shows one decision table for validating a customer. Line number 10 shows four columns. The first one defines the rule name, the next two define conditions, and the last one is for defining actions/consequences. Lines from 11 to 13 represent the individual rules; one line per rule. Each cell defines the parameters...