[Wonder-disc] Re: New Rule Editor

[Max M. <max...@ma...>]

Hi Anjo,
	Ah, RuleEditor the app that never meant to ship, but did ;)

<snip>

> I just started this evening after I really got fed up with the lack of
> sorting:
>
> http://www.prnet.de/RegEx/shot.tiff
>
> The idea is to have a framework that you can embed into your D2W apps 
> and
> that will ultimately provide
>
> - MD5 sums (unique IDs) on rules
> - thus have comments, grouping, filtering, ordering, printing, live 
> updates
> yaddayadda.

Nice idea. Would the comments be stored along with every rule? Meaning 
are you planning on having a subclass of Rule? One thing to be aware of 
is that if you subclass Rule then you will need to have this method:

     public static Object 
decodeWithKeyValueUnarchiver(EOKeyValueUnarchiver eokeyvalueunarchiver)
     {
         return new 
MyRule(eokeyvalueunarchiver.decodeIntForKey("author"), 
(EOQualifier)eokeyvalueunarchiver.decodeObjectForKey("lhs"), 
(Assignment)eokeyvalueunarchiver.decodeObjectForKey("rhs"));
     }

Or else your rules will not load correctly. Also the way RuleEditor 
works it will not respect your custom Rule subclass name (it overwrites 
it with Rule).

Here is also one from my wish list:
Be able to add additional qualifiers, for instance being able to 
associate the operator 'isKindOfEntity' with a qualifier 
ERDKindOfEntityQualifier such that I could write a lhs of a rule like: 
'entity isKindOfEntity User'.


> It all started with an idea to reverse the process for fully named
> pageConfigurations: instead of having (pc = "bla")->..., just have a
> bla.d2wmodel that will prerend ((pc = "bla") and ...) on every rule 
> after
> loading.
>
> The second idea was to have live evaluation of rules; have an interface
> where you can set the significant keys  - I know that NS has done away 
> with
> them, but still what you like to know is what value will get returned 
> when
> you put pc, propertyKey, entityName and task into it.

It's not that ERD did away with significant keys, it's just that instead 
of having a global set of significant keys each key has it's own set of 
significant keys. So actually having a graphical way of seeing that 
information would be nice.

> So since it is embedded, you could change all values with minimal 
> turnaround
> times and finally save it. Anyway, that's the idea and once I really,
> *really* have some time left, I'll probably finish one of my two dozen
> projects I still have in mind...did I tell you about the JavaBrowser
> replacement?-)

So much code to write, so little time ;)

Regards,
	Max