Thank you for reporting this user experience... and I think this is of interest for other users too. I would address your problem at different levels..
You basically are asking for a more declarative approach to writing business rules, and that is perfectly understandable. The DRL rules are "technical" rules and are somewhat in between a purely declarative language and a programming language. This said, "rules should fire or not depending on the context": if that context is part of the business logic, i.e. lives at the same level of the other preconditions, it should be added to the premises of the rules, and now the problem is finding a better language for your knowledge engineers to model business rules. If instead the logic can be understood to be a "meta-level" logic, so that you'd have to create "innatural" auxiliary control facts, you could possibly explore the meta-rule approach I outlined in my previous comment. Of course, this still suffers from the same technicality issue, but the rules would be written by the business users and the meta rules by the technical ones... (btw The reason for not updating metadata is that they are defined statically at the rule level, whereas you would actually be interested in the activations! and this is quite different) Also remember that Drools is community driven: if you think that there is some missing feature, please submit a proposal (e.g. would something like SBVR be more suitable for you?), maybe others will join you in supporting that. A "critical mass" may help to get it done, and of course you can help and contribute :) -- View this message in context: http://drools.46999.n3.nabble.com/Cutom-Attributes-in-Drools-tp4019692p4019754.html Sent from the Drools: User forum mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ rules-users mailing list rules-users@lists.jboss.org https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users