Table of Contents
(updated to Drools 4.0)
Drools 4.0 has a "native" rule language that is non XML textual format. This format is very light in terms of punctuation, and supports natural and domain specific languages via "expanders" that allow the language to morph to your problem domain. This chapter is mostly concerted with the native rule format. The Diagrams used are known as "rail road" diagrams, and are basically flow charts for the language terms. For the technically very keen, you can also refer to "DRL.g" which is the Antlr3 grammar for the rule language. If you use the Rule Workbench, a lot of the rule structure is done for you with content assistance, for example, type "ru" and press ctrl+space, and it will build the rule structure for you.
A rule file is typically a file with a .drl extension. In a drl file you can have multiple rules, queries and functions, as well as some resource declarations like imports, globals and attributes that are assigned and used by your rules and queries. However, you are also able to spread your rules across multiple rule files (in that case, the extension .rule is suggested, but not required) - spreading rules across files can help with managing large numbers of rules. A DRL file is simply a text file.
The overall structure of a rule file is:
The order in which the elements are declared is not important, except for the package name that, if declared, must be the first element in the rules file. All elements are optional, so you will use only those you need. We will discuss each of them in the following sections.
For the inpatients, just as an early view, a rule has the following rough structure:
rule"name"
attributes
whenLHS
thenRHS
end
Its really that simple. Mostly punctuation is not needed, even the double quotes for "name" are optional, as are newlines. Attributes are simple (always optional) hints to how the rule should behave. LHS is the conditional parts of the rule, which follows a certain syntax which is covered below. RHS is basically a block that allows dialect specific semantic code to be executed.
It is important to note that white space is not important, EXCEPT in these case of domain specific languages, in which case each line is processed before the following line (and spaces may be significant to the domain language).