Building from command line in JRules 6.7

In my post last week [2 years of JRules] I had a bit of a moan that JRules didn't have out of the box functionality to build a ruleset from outside of eclipse. Ironically a couple of days after I posted that up I was trying out JRules 6.7 and it appears ILOG have pulled their finger out and provided a way of building a ruleset from outside the eclipse rule studio.

It works by running eclipse in headless mode and providing a script location as one of the command line arguments. The given script is written in javascript and calls the JRules API.

For those of you who just want to dive straight into the code here are the downloads:

rule-builder-script.xml - this is an ant build file to run eclipse in headless mode and invoke the script

RulesBuild.js - this is the script that builds and extracts a ruleset by calling the JRules API.

I won't go through the ant script in detail, but if you are new to ant, have a look at the ant user manual.

The target "BuildSomething" is a dummy target for you to change. Here are the parameters that need to be updated:

projectName - This is the name of the project which contains the main rule flow.
extractorName - Name of extractor to use
archiveFile - path of where to save the ruleset jar
workspace.dir - path to the eclipse workspace which contains your rule projects

The other target "buildAndExtractRuleset" which BuildSomething calls, calls the macrodef task "headless.appication" which actually fires up eclipse in headless mode. The variables in here that need to be updated are:

script.location - path to RulesBuild.js
eclipse.home - the install path to eclipse

Once you update these variables you can just run the task BuildSomething (command line: ant -f rule-builder-script.xml BuildSomething) .

The script will take a bit of time to run depending on the number of rules in your projects, and once you see RulesBuild.js ENDED , your ruleset jar should be in the location of archiveFile.
Now let's look at the script. Firstly get to know the global variables that are accessible in the script:

Global Variable Name	Java Type	Description
workspace	org.eclipse.core.resources.IWorkspace	Provides access to the projects
ruleModel	ilog.rules.studio.model.IlrRuleModel	Provides access to the Rule Studio Model
modelHelper	ilog.rules.studio.javascript.dom.IlrModelHelper	Modifies to Rule Studio rule model
importHelper	ilog.rules.studio.javascript.dom.IlrImportHelper	Imports projects into the workspace
buildHelper	ilog.rules.studio.javascript.dom.IlrBuildHelper	Builds the projects of the workspace
extractorHelper	ilog.rules.studio.javascript.dom.IlrExtractorHelper	Extracts the ruleset archives from the rule projects

The function main() is the entry point to the script. This reads in the arguments , turns off auto-building , calls the build functions, calls the generate archive action and then prints a report of all the projects built.

I'll skip to the function build in ArchiveBuilder (line 166):

First all the projects in the workspace are cleaned and refreshed:

Utilities.println("Begin Clean...");
buildHelper.clean ();
Utilities.println("End Clean...");

Utilities.println("Begin Refresh...");
for each( project in workspace.getRoot().getProjects() ) {
project.refreshLocal(2, null);
}
Utilities.println("End Refresh.");

You could add some code before this to open projects that are closed in the workspace.


Then a full build is called and for each project, a report is generated:

Utilities.println("Begin Full Build...");
buildHelper.fullBuild();
Utilities.println("End Full Build");

for each( project in workspace.getRoot().getProjects() ) {
var report = new BuildReport (project,buildHelper.getBuildErrors(project, buildHelper.SEVERITY_ERROR));
this.reports.push (report);
}

That's the build complete, i.e. the ilr has been created for all your business rules, decision tables, ruleflows, etc.

Now all this ilr has to be packaged up into a jar.

The generate function(line 192) is called to to this.

var rp = ruleModel.getRuleProject(ruleprojectName) ;
var jarfile = archivePath;
Utilities.println("Extracting ruleset archive " + rp.getName() + " with extractor '" + extractor + "'");
extractorHelper.extract(rp,jarfile,extractor);
Utilities.println("Successfully extracted in " + (new java.io.File (jarfile)).getAbsolutePath());

The extractorHelper is called to extract the jar. If you don't have an extractor, the extract method is overloaded to also generate a ruleset just with a RuleProject and a path location.

That's about it. I really advise you to go through the RulesBuild.js and look at the JRules API documentation. If you have any questions post me a comment.