> On Thursday 05 May 2005 18:54, S. Isaac Dealey wrote:
>> The last few days I've been focusing my energies pretty
>> heavily on a
>> RuleManager.cfc engine for setting up arbitrary business
>> rules using
>> XML and CFC's. So the same engine would be useful for
>> email filters,
> Is that BizXML or something of your own devising ?
Hi Tom,
It's designed to use schema-less xml with a collection of CFC's...
Each CFC in the criteria package contains its own information about
how to display, evaluate and localize individual criteria. For
example, I'm currently working with the Text criteria,
(rulecriteria.text.cfc) -- individual criteria CFC's are stored under
the /ontap/_components/_cfc/ directory and the rulemanager.cfc (in the
root cfc directory) handles adding or removing packages of criteria
CFC's. So the directory structure looks like this:
/_cfc/rulemanager.cfc
/_cfc/rulecriteria.cfc
/_cfc/rulecriteria/text.cfc - extends /_cfc/rulecriteria.cfc
/_cfc/rulecriteria/date.cfc - extends /_cfc/rulecriteria.cfc
/_cfc/rulecriteria/percent.cfc - extends /_cfc/rulecriteria.cfc
So... if I'm working on a special implementation that needs additional
criteria types, I can add or remove packages from the RuleManager
object with RuleManager.addPackage("rulecriteria.myproject") or
RuleManager.removePackage("myproject.rulecriteria"). So I could remove
the default criteria types by using
RuleManager.removeCriteria("rulecriteria").
The individual criteria CFC's then provide localized text for the user
interface if the rulemanager will allow end-users to edit rules
directly and contain the CFML logic used to generate and evaluate
criteria nodes of the specified type.
So an XML packet might look like this:
<ruleset>
<rule ruleid="..."
name="My Email Filter"
description="optional description">
<criteria
type="rulecriteria.text"
property="subject"
format="contains"
expression="cialis" />
<criteria type="rulecriteria.or" />
<criteria
type="rulecriteria.text"
property="subject"
format="contains"
expression="viagra" />
</rule>
</ruleset>
The rulemanager.cfc then brokers the relationship between the
application and the individual criteria types, so when you evaluate a
rule it walks through the criteria nodes, checks to see if it's
instantiated a criteria object for the type, then executes
criteria.test(criterianode,ruleContext) against that criteria object.
Forms for and descriptions of individual rules / criteria are handled
similarly, i.e. RuleManager.describe(ruleid) loops over the criteria
for the rule and gets a localized description from the criteria
object, and RuleManager.getCriteriaForm(type,ruleid,criteria) fetches
an appropriate html form from the criteria object (as an html library
structure so that other components or templates may modify the form as
needed). RuleManager.setRuleCriteria(ruleid,criteria,data) - where
data is usually the form collection, handles updating the XML packet,
but it gets the new node (as a string of text) from the individual
criteria type CFC.
I'm still fleshing out the details ... I'm not entirely happy with
them currently... the attributes for the rule node are a nitpicky
detail for me -- I'd like to have <rule id="..." name="..."
description="..." /> because to me that seems the most
clean/intuitive, but "name" and "id" could cause conflicts with the
name and id properties of an html form if input elements are given
those names. So for that reason I might use <rule ruleid="..."
rulename="..." ruledescription="..." /> but this just seems really
ugly to me... and of course, I don't want to use "rulename" in the
form and "name" in the xml packet... so... it's an annoying issue --
seems like it shouldn't be an issue at all, but it's very frustrating.
I'd not heard of bizXML but wasn't able to find any good references to
it on google.com ... you have a url?
s. isaac dealey 954.522.6080
new epoch : isn't it time for a change?
add features without fixtures with
the onTap open source framework
http://www.fusiontap.com
http://coldfusion.sys-con.com/author/4806Dealey.htm
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