Microsoft XPS format

During a web demonstration of the Rule Manager I had to go for a full OS reboot. Not very pretty for a product demonstration. What happened? Not really sure, but it seems that the latest version of Adobe Acrobat (8.1.0) started to lock the generated Rule PDF report.

Few days later I started to get the forced updates from Adobe. Considering I have many VM installations to test all different platforms and configurations, you can imagine I'm not too happy with these forced downloads.

Finally the free PDF viewer started to contain advertisement to FedEx. These 'convenient' link buttons are always a big annoyance to me.

It was time to provide an alternative to the PDF format. The latest release of the Rule Manager (1.5.0.17) supports now the Microsoft XPS as an alternative.

The good part of this is that an XPS viewer comes pre-installed on Microsoft Vista. I'm not really sure if it is part of .NET 3.0 framework, but on my XP SP2 box I could use the XPS viewer as well.

Currently the Adobe PDF format is still the default report format, but you can easily change that (and we will store your preferences in your user settings)

The main shortcoming I currently see with the XPS viewer is that you can not rotate a page.

Here are the results:
XPS: http://www.acumenbusiness.com/portals/Loan%20Mortgage%20Approval.xps
PDF: http://www.acumenbusiness.com/portals/Loan%20Mortgage%20Approval.pdf

Rule Manager 1.5.0.x is released

The new Rule Manager (1.5.0.x) is released! There are many new features and enhancements. Here are some of the highlights:

• Rule Validation; in the interactive rule map you can let the rules engine resolve any term.
  This starts an animated goal seeking process. The default waiting time is 0.5 sec. You can change this in the debug options.
• Panning and zooming of the interactive rule map.
• Creation of business rules and business terms are completely accessible during the trial period.
• Export your rule policy to Windows Workflow Foundation, and you see the rules executing on top of Microsoft's Forward chaining rules engine. By default the rule tracing is on. You can see the rule execution in the output console of Visual Studio.

Existing users can follow the internal update wizard (except that you need the .NET Framework 3.0)

New users can start the installation wizard that is available here.

Suppress “A first chance exception of type…” Messages in VS 2005

When writing an API framework, it's good practice to throw appropriate framework exceptions. I have several extended application exceptions in my rule engine framework. When executing all unit tests, or just stepping through the development code, I would see hundred of messages in Visual Studio of 'A first chance exception of type' ...
This is just perfect behavior from my development point of view. I'm throwing these exceptions myself from the framework. I've made several attempts to find how to disable these messages. And finally I found the answer on Peter Macej blog:

How To Disable “A first chance exception of type…” Messages in VS 2005

So how do we suppress the messages? You most likely see these messages in
Immediate Window because you have set Redirect all Output Window text to the
Immediate Window in Tools - Options… - Debugging - General. That’s why when you
right-click in Immediate Window, you cannot see any option to disable messages.
It’s Output Window text and thus you need to set it in the Output Window. So
open Output Window, right-click and uncheck Exception Messages from context
menu. Simple but it took me one hour to find it.

It was just a simple context menu option on the Output window: Uncheck the 'Exception Messages'.

I was always trying to do this somewhere in the Debug \ Exceptions form. Well I'm glad I found it. It makes the Output windows trace less convoluted with irrelevant messages.

WebCast about Windows Workflow Foundation Rules

Tomorrow, there is a free webcast by Kavita Kamani (Microsoft) about using the rules engine that is part of Windows Workflow Foundation. You can register for this event here.

Microsoft's rules engine is a bare bones forward-chaining rules engine. The rule engine can also be invoked without using the workflow engine. When you export a business rule policy from the Rule Manager, it will generate a C# solution that illustrates how rules are invoked without the workflow engine.

Start Date: 5/18/07
Start Time: 2:00 PM (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
End Time: 3:30 PM (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)

Rule Validation Video

The Rule Manager will soon be enhanced with a new feature that allows the Interactive Rule Map as a Rule Debugger. See a video here: Rule Validation Video. It almost became an action movie :).

This is part one of providing Rule Validation (that is: testing your rules) with the Rule Manager.


Color legend for Rule:

• Green: Rule fired
• Red: Rule failed
• Orange: Rule is pending

Color legend for Term:

• Green: Term is assigned
• Orange: Term is unknown
  
  

How it works? We use the backward chaining algorithm to resolve a goal. The user can select any business term as a goal.

• When the user clicks resolve, the inference engine will try to resolve this goal by executing the rules.
• When a term is encountered that can not be derived from other rules, an ask dialog will be shown to the user. The user value will be stored into an internal table, so consecutive runs will first use this table before asking the user. Internally the rule manager supports defining restrictions on business terms. This allows the inference engine to show input options when asking a value for a term.

About the user data value table:

• The table can be cleared by clicking on 'Reset All Values' from the context menu.
• You can change the value of one particular term by selecting the 'Reset Term' on the Term context menu.
• Note: also business terms that are inferred by the inference engine can be overwritten by the user. Be careful with this because this would skip the backward-chaining of this rule branch.

13 years ago

Found my old research paper from 1994 "An object-oriented approach to knowledge representation in a biomedical domain". Looked like they scanned the contents of the original paper.

It's pretty outdated. Note that this was before the existence of Java or C#, but there was good old Smalltalk.

One thing is still relevant. The construction of a hybrid knowledge based system. Translated to 2007; the semantic web 3.0. Defining a clear terminological component (vocabulary) in order to make assertions from basic facts.

Importing Biztalk rules and export to Windows Workflow Foundation

The new Rule Manager (version 1.4.0.50) is released!



With just a few mouse clicks, the Rule Manager from Acumen Business imports a BizTalk rule policy and export the rules to the Windows Workflow Foundation format.



The export generates a complete Visual studio solutions. This includes the .rules file, the Business Object model and the code that calls Windows Worklow Engine.

And voila, here is the results of a CarDiagnosis example with the recommendation that I have to get 'Fuel'

It's just a console output, but you hopefully get the idea. It's an executable solution that can be incorporated into the IT infrastructure.

I don't think we can make it any easier.

What you need:

• Microsoft BizTalk 2006
• .NET 3.0 (this includes Windows Workflow Foundation)
• Acumen's Rule Manager with the BizTalk and Windows Workflow Foundation adapters

What you get:

• Your BizTalk rule policy converted to Windows Workflow Foundation. The best part is that the Windows Workflow Foundation is free and is included in the .NET 3.0 framework.

Business Rules for the Windows Workflow Foundation

If you like to see the latest version of the RuleManager with support for Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation, you can request to see the product in action at the Business Rules Forum. Fill in the form here.



The image shows the imported DiscountRuleSet from the Microsoft Windows Worklow Foundation advanced policy example.

How to understand a large ruleset?

Peter Lin has a very valid concern :

My main caution to users is that no matter how nice the writing part is, how
does the tool make it easier to maintain and understand a large ruleset? Does it
have the ability to analyze the rules and show the relationship to the user?

At Acumen Business (where I work), we have addressed this issue by the introduction of the Interactive Rule Map. Sometimes also referred to as Rule Spider. This dynamic rulemap shows the direct dependencies of rules-to-terms and from terms-to-rules.

There is also a complete Rule Graph generation, however that will quickly loose it’s power when hundreds of rules are defined. The interactive rule map is an advanced browser that shows parts of the rule graph.

Currently we are doing some research to integrate the Rule Validation into the Interactive Rule Map. This allows step through debugging of the just the business rules. Our prototype is looking very promising.

What is missing in WWF rules

There is an interesting discussion going on how WWF rules is different from a BRMS solution. Although some comparisions are more related to the comparison with QuickRules.NET, there are quite a few valid points.

The argument list WWF Rules vs. BRMS rules will soon have to be rewritten. Acumen Busines is in the process of providing their tool components for WWF. This will include

• Rule Repository
• Rule Validation and Verification
• Rule Animation
• Rule Reporting

Stay tuned.

Decision Tree Editor

In previous posts I have mentioned the usage of Decision Trees or Decision Tables to represent business rules.

Acumen Business has developed an editor to create such Decision Tree rules. See the video here. The decision tree can be viewed in horizontal or vertical layout.

In order to effectively use such a format on rule execution; the runtime inference engine must support this kind of rule directly. Unfortunately BizTalk does not support this out-of-the-box. CA's RuleSp (or the new Aion) does support Decisions Tree natively in their inference engine. Corticon's rule sheets are also very similar to this Decision Tree format. Although it seems that it models a rule sheet like a decision table, the fact that certain branches can be overriden makes it more a decision tree. I'm pretty sure that Blaze and Ilog have something similar as well.