How to Build a Business Rules Engine

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Creating a business rules engine that permits users to define business rules can be

overwhelming. In a short time it is easy for users to define dozens or perhaps hun-

dreds of rules. If there is no intuitive logical structure within which the users can

organize and keep track of these rules, there may be a limit to how useful the rules

engine is.

Users tend to categorize the rules into sets, and they often think about the sets

rather than the individual rules. This is not surprising, since it is not possible to accu-

rately remember the details of more than just a few rules at a time. The rules sets

nearly always correspond to the business processes that exist for the business domain

covered by the application that runs the rules engine. If the application ...