james is having problems, so thought I'd forward for him.
Mark
*From: *James Owen <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
*Date: *June 16, 2009 6:11:52 PM CDT
*To: *Rules Dev List <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
*Subject: **Re: [rules-dev] Debugging, Tracing and Visualization of
rule execution*
Greetings:
Just a word and I'm not sure how to implement this: In OPSJ Dr.
Forgy implemented "flagged" IF conditional statements such as (pseudo
code)
Rule_1
IF
[f1] something1 happens
[f2] something2 happens
[f3] something3 happens
THEN
do something
ELSE [f1] fails
report why or do something
ELSE [f2] fails
report why or do something
ELSE [f3] fails
report why or do something
ELSE
do the EHS of the rule
This is pretty much what he calls "syntatic sugar" that you can
program in the code each time. BUT, he made it so the programmer
could easily check a rule (or all of them of so desired) to see why
it failed. I used it with great success on a couple of projects and
really, really miss it when programming in any other rulebased system.
Also, this is part of the very thing that Edson was complaining about
and I call a programmer's Beta-1 Error problem. It didn't fire when
it should have fired - so why didn't it? This would help immensely.
Surely, if one old man working in his 3rd floor attic in Pittsburgh,
PA, can implement this in his rulebase in just a couple of days (I
was there when he did it back in 1998), a whole cadre of experienced
Java programmers can implement it a world-class rulebase, right?
SDG
jco
"This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
Hamlet, Act 1, Scene III
http://www-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/hamlet/hamlet.1.3.html
On Jun 16, 2009, at 5:29 PM, Mark Proctor wrote:
Daniel Gebler wrote:
For our integration of Drools 5.0 we want to provide end users with
limited technical skills the possibility to debug, trace and
visualize the rule execution as well as the fact base.
Questions that are frequently asked by users as well as by the
development/qa team:
- Did my rule r1 fire for this query?
- Why did rule r1 not fire (i.e. which constraint doesn’t
match)?
- Which kind of rule dependencies (chaining) do I have in
my rule base? Rule r1 and r2 are dependent iff action of r1 (e.g.
publish a fact) makes constraint of r2 true.
- Which rules need to fire in order to generate the
additional fact f1 in the fact base?
- What is the smallest change in the fact base (additional
facts etc.) in order to make rule r1 to fire (abduction)?
Problems:
- Eclipse plugin doesn’t provide information of what
didn’t happen and why it didn’t happen ( ‘Audit’ view allows just
tracking of positive cases, i.e. what happened). Furthermore the
stability of the eclipse plugin seems to be limited.
- Integrating over SPI doesn’t allow to show the Rete
network because Rete view works only with drl files
- How to provide feedback to a normal end user of the
search server (limited tech skills) about rule-related information?
Solution ideas/approaches + our assessment:
1. Use a run time monitor providing on-demand log trace
information when facts are being published. The log trace provides
the information about which and why a particular constraint is or
is not satisfied. Our initial implementation uses an aspect
oriented approach (JBoss AOP) to gather relevant information. In
detail: Our initial implementation uses an aspect oriented approach
(JBoss AOP) to gather the information by intercepting
EntryPointNode.assertObject(), and traversing the rete network to
collect the constraint information for every unique alpha/join
node. This will allow to visualize the log trace (GUI) and
interpret the trace in the context of our product. We discussed
this approached in #drools with Edson Tirelli and he was very
interested.
2. Use drools AgendaEventListener. Listener does not gets
enough debug info exposed, esp. we cannot extract the cause to
reject a rule. Not enough information available therefore this one
is not an option.
Additionally, it would be nice for our development to also
visualize the Rete-OO network, but that seems to be impossible when
integrating drools directly via the SPI classes. Is there a way to
connect the viewer to a network inside a running VM?
Constructing against the SPI instead of using DRL, you are scaring
me now?
Mark
We would like to hear whether you know any other opinions, or have
points how to implement those features. Please share your
experience how to bridge the gap between end-users with limited
technical backgrounds expressing and investigating the rule inference.
Thanks,
Daniel
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