It sounds like you need an opportunity to discuss your business problem in more detail.

In particular, some clarification would be useful around your requirements for inheritance, cancellation and simultaneous firing. I’ll warn you up front that most rule engines (not just Microsoft’s) fire rules in a single-threaded manner one at a time.

Let’s take this offline to email. I will try to either help you myself or find you a contact who can help you.

Thanks.

i don’t have any rules which are required to be executed more than once or not need to be explicitly ordered.

I am needing a rule engine based workflow application in which

1) Rules inside a ruleset can inherently other rules explicitly

2) One rule can cancel previous rules explicitly which are waiting for user action

3)Two rules with different actions can be fired simultaneously and action will be taken on both as a result of a ruleset execution.

4) During execution of a flowchart workflow, at stage 1 suppose Rule A gets fired and action takes place based on that rule, then workflow moves to stage 2 and then it comes to stage 1 again and now again Rule A condition gets satisfied, then RuleA will not be fired as Rule A has already been fired once in that workflow.

As the ruleset size is huge, i am thinking of moving it to seperate file from workflow.

Please suggest the possible technology and solution

Cheers

Thanks for your comment.

As my posting describes, the WF Rules features introduced in 3.0 are available in both 3.5 and 4.0, so you can leverage them from WF4 if so desired.

Again, the current WF Rules features are not integrated with WF4. That may or may not be an issue for you, depending on your architecture. Things to consider: will the rules be used in a stateless or stateful manner? Will the rules reason to a decision, or will they need to schedule workflow actions?

As for forward chaining or sequential, you need to look at your rule requirements and consider if you have rules that will need to execute more than once or cannot be explicitly ordered. Try putting your rules in an order and see if the logic will work correctly.

Keep in mind that sequential rules will often execute correctly under forward chaining (although potentially slower), but forward chaining rules will generally not execute correctly in a sequential mode..

You may also find that some of your rules will work sequentially and that other rules may require forward chaining. It is OK to execute some rules in one mode and other rules in a different mode.

I do get this question on a regular basis and will consider it for a future blog posting.

My problem is that i am not able to decide whether i require forward chaining or will sequential rules will be fine for me.

I am in process of designing an application for which i am thinking of whether to wf 4.0 or wf3.5.

Problem arises from the fact that wf4.0 does not support forward chaining.

My problem is that i am not sure whether my requirements require forward chaining or not.I read articles about difference between forward chaining and sequential rules but couldn’t understand.

It would be of great help for me if you can help me by giving some examples of sequential and forward chaining rules and how these affect the final outcome(action) of ruleset(if ruleset exists in wf4.0??).

Thanks in advance

Cheers
rajiv