Guvnor’s working sets

As you may notice, Guvnor has suffered some changes in the last months. Maybe the most notorious feature is the support for FROM/ACCUMULATE/COLLECT patterns, but we are doing a lot of other minor (and not so minor) changes too (I will post about them in the near future). One of the  experimental features that can be found in the trunk today are Working Sets. Imagine the situation were you have imported a model containing 1000 Fact Types (classes). When editing a rule, you will have a lot of Patterns/Actions to choose from, indeed you will have more than 1000 options.  As you can see this could increase rule’s creation time.

What if you could define a subset of related Fact Types? If your model is about Medicine, maybe you want to group all the Fact Types related to cardiology, traumatology, etc. Then you can use just use one or more of those subsets when creating a rule. Well this is what Working Sets are about: a subset of Fact Types that you can use when editing rules.

You could think about Working Sets as different scopes for Fact Types. We will see a simple example to make things clear. Suppose a Model with 7 Fact Types:

Here you can find a screencast showning how to define and use Working Sets in guvnor. In it I create two different Working Sets: Animals and Vehicles. Animals will contain Cat, Person and Dog; and Vehicle will have Car, Airplane and Train. Then I’ll show how Working Sets affect Rule’s edition. Right now, Working Sets are activated by users using the button in Rule’s Editor window. This is just for development/testing purpose, in the future Working Sets will be assigned to users by an administrator.