Dependent rules

When a business rule triggers other business rules as part of its implementation, the rules that are triggered are called dependent rules of the first rule. An example is the RuleAND rule implementor supplied with Business Rule Beans (BRBeans). It uses two or more dependent rules, each of which is assumed to return a true or false value. When a rule with RuleAND as its implementor is triggered, it triggers each of its dependent rules and a logical AND operation is performed on all of the returned results. The result of this AND operation is returned as the result of the top-level rule.

Dependent rules are specified in the attributes of the top-level rule where the fully qualified name of each dependent rule is listed. When the top-level rule is triggered, an array of dependent rule names is passed to the rule implementor's init() method. They are stored here until they are triggered by the fire() method.

Note: The BRBeans framework does not ensure that the dependent rules specified in the enterprise beans are actually triggered. Triggering the dependent rules and interpreting their results is entirely up to the rule implementor of the top-level rule.

Dependent rules can be nested within other dependent rules. In other words, a dependent rule of some particular rule can have its own dependent rules which, in turn, can have their own dependent rule and so on. The BRBeans framework does not place any restriction on the number of levels that dependent rules can be nested. The only practical restriction is the complexity of the rule set that is built up when dependent rules are nested many levels deep.


Related concepts
Overview of Business Rule Beans



Searchable topic ID:   cbrb_ruldep
Last updated: Jun 21, 2007 8:07:48 PM CDT    WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation, Version 5.0.2
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