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visual rules 4: maven integration

visual rules finally integrates with maven

In my point of view one of the main drawbacks of visual rules 3 was it's missing maven integration. Now that a beta version of visual rules 4 is available I wanted to see if the better JDT integration finally allows me to integrate visual rules in a maven build process - without the need for ugly hacks...

I've created the following project structure with the upper projects depending on the lower ones.

myproject-service (service implementation)
myproject-rules (business rules)
myproject-api (value objects)

Before beeing able to run the example project you need to install the visual rules runtime library in your repository. The file can be found here \Visual Rules 4.0\eclipse\plugins\de.visualrules.runtime_4.0.0.v20080118-1512\visualrules-runtime.jar. Now run mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=de.innovations.visualrules -DgeneratePom=true -DartifactId=visualrules-runtime -Dversion=4.0.0 -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile=visualrules-runtime.jar Now you are ready to try the example project. Run mvn eclipse:eclipse in the root directory of the extracted archive and mvn will generate the project files for you. Note how easy it is to convert a project to "visual rules project" - the correct nature and builder is all you need:

Now open the "library" ruletree in the myproject-rules project with visual rules. As you can see the ruletree is pretty basic: looping through a list of books it sorts out all books that have been written by a favourite author.

After generating the sourcecode with visual rules we are able to compile our myproject-service project and run it's test. This is all because visual rules is using all the standard JDT mechanics: standard source folders and classpath settings.

package de.kaigrabfelder.vr4;

import java.util.List;

import myproject_rules.IContextMyproject_rules;
import myproject_rules.Myproject_rulesRuleModel;
import myproject_rules.library.ILibraryRequestData;
import de.visualrules.runtime.IRequest;
import de.visualrules.runtime.ISession;
import de.visualrules.runtime.RuleSessionFactory;

/**
 * basic dummy service that makes use of visual rules
 * 
 * @author Kai Grabfelder
 * 
 */
public class MyService {

/**
	 * retrieves a list of potential favourite books depending on very
	 * sophisticated logic that is modeled in visual rules
	 * 
	 * @param allBooks
	 *            list of all available books
	 * @param favouriteAuthor
	 *            the favourite author
	 * 
	 * @return the list of potential favourite books
	 */
	@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
	public List<Book> retrieveFavouriteBooks(List<Book> allBooks,
			Author favouriteAuthor) {
		// create a rule session
		ISession session = RuleSessionFactory.createSession();

// create a rule request
		IRequest request = session.createRequest();

// create a request data object for the rule
		ILibraryRequestData requestData = Myproject_rulesRuleModel
				.createLibraryRequestData();

// access the rule context
		IContextMyproject_rules context = requestData
				.getContextMyproject_rules();

// set our input data
		context.setBooks(allBooks);
		context.setFavouriteAuthor(favouriteAuthor);

// execute the rule
		try {
			Myproject_rulesRuleModel.performLibrary(request, requestData);
		} catch (Exception e) {
			throw new RuntimeException(e);
		}

// read the output data element
		List favouriteBooks = context.getFavouriteBooks();

// close the rule session
		session.closeSession();

return favouriteBooks;
	}

}

package de.kaigrabfelder.vr4;

import java.util.LinkedList;
import java.util.List;

import junit.framework.TestCase;

public class MyServiceTest extends TestCase {

public void testRetrieveFavouriteBooks() {
		MyService service = new MyService();

List<Book> allBooks = new LinkedList<Book>();

Author tolkien = new Author();
		tolkien.setName("J. R. R. Tolkien");

Author grisham = new Author();
		grisham.setName("John Grisham");

Book one = new Book("Lord of the Rings", tolkien);
		Book two = new Book("The Runaway Jury", grisham);

assertEquals(tolkien, one.getAuthors().get(0));

allBooks.add(one);
		allBooks.add(two);
		List<Book> favouriteBooks = service.retrieveFavouriteBooks(allBooks,
				tolkien);
		assertEquals(1, favouriteBooks.size());
		assertEquals("Lord of the Rings", favouriteBooks.get(0).getTitle());
	}

}

The API for generating source code from visual rules is currently not public, therefore I've not yet made any attemps to let maven handle this. I'll revisit this once visual rules 4 is final. Another cool improvement would be the introduction of a JdbcTemplate style wrapper around the rule execution api - so that the user does not have to worry about session close or exception handling.

In conclusion one can say that due to the stronger JDT integration visual rules 4 itself integrates more closely with maven2 - something I was waiting for really long...

Click here to download the three example projects.

Responses[2]

Posted by Kai Grabfelder on February 10, 2008 4:55:00 PM CET #

Re: visual rules 4: maven integration

Comment from Mike Haller on February 12, 2008 8:49:05 AM CET #

How did you get vr4 to generate code into /src/main/java/ intead of /vr-srcgen/?

Re: visual rules 4: maven integration

Comment from Kai Grabfelder on February 14, 2008 8:24:10 PM CET #

you can change the source folder here: Open Rule integration perspective, open settings view of rule model, change the folder in the section "Java Code Generator"

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Re: visual rules 4: maven integration Comment from Anonymous on May 19, 2012 6:45:21 PM CEST #
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