Trace rule execution

A first step in analyzing results of executing Decision Services is to gain visibility to the rules that fired. With rule tracing, you can see which rules and Rulesheets fired in processing a work document. The Rule trace viewer lets you:

1. See the sequence of actions that took place in a Ruletest.
2. Sort the columns of the Rule Trace View.
3. Export the view contents.
4. Click on a line to highlight it the Ruletest Output.
5. Double-click on a line to open the related Rulesheet at the rule that was applied.
6. Make and apply changes to the Rulesheet, and then save it.
7. Run the Ruletest again to see the change applied, and marking the differences in the Expected column.
8. Filter the view content to focus on specific lines.

You can reduce the time it takes diagnose rule execution problems by efficiently analyzing the Ruletest as it executes to trace all the rules that fired. Run a Ruletest with the additional functionality of the Rule Trace Viewer by just clicking a button:

The Ruletest runs the test as well a rule trace across all Rulesheets, and then presents the results in the Rule Trace tab, as shown:

Highlight—Click anywhere on a line to highlight that element in the Testsheet output. Click on any item in the Ruletest to see all the lines related to that element highlighted in the Rule Trace Viewer, as illustrated where a filter was applied to see only the lines that contain Shop in the viewer:

Sort—Click on any column header in the Rule Trace tab to sort the tab content in ascending order. Click again to sort into descending order.

Locate—Double-click on any line to open the related Rulesheet positioned at the Action line and rule. In the Ruletest, copy the Output to the Expected column so you can see changes. On the Rulesheet shown here, the discount was modified from 2% to 5%:

Without saving the Rulesheet, run the Ruletest again.

The change and its impact are highlighted. You can choose to save the modified Rulesheet or close it so that the change is ignored.

The output of this example in Excel is:

The type filter text box at the top of the Rule Trace panel lets you enter a value to match in the Rule Trace View output:

You can construct complex filters with regular expressions.

^ = beginning of line
$ = end of line
[] = any of the listed comma-separated characters
\[ or \] = escaped special characters

As an example for Cargo, you could to search for Cargo [2] or Cargo [4] by using Cargo \[[2,4]\]