Ann Arbor Talk Recap and Question Answered

I gave my “Be a Rules Follower” presentation tonight at the Ann Arbor Developer’s group.  It was really interesting to visit another user group and see how their meeting are run compared to CINNUG.  I think the talk went really well and everyone was a good sport about my audience participation gimmick. I got a lot of really good questions from the group.  If you attended then I hope you got something useful out of the talk, and if you missed the talk, then I’m giving it again next week at the CINNUG meeting. :) 

The slide deck and demo code (as complicated and overly-complex as it is….snicker) should be posted soon at the AAD site and also next week at the CINNUG site.  I’ll probably post to my own site as well.

During the presentation someone asked me a great question: 

“If a rule is re-evaluated because of forward chaining and the rule re-evaluates to the same answer as it did before, does the action for the rule execute again?”

The answer is “YES”.  I simulated this by setting up a rule set that included a rule that would be reevaluated during the execution.  In the “Then” action for the rule I decremented an integer field on the workflow.  I then executed the ruleset and at the end the integer had been decremented each time the rule had been reevaluated (the rule evaluated to true both times it ran and the final integer value was 2 less that it’s default of 10).  So, hopefully this answers the question the gentleman asked.

If you don’t know what forward chaining is, check out this article on WF rules and find out.  Or, come to my talk next week. :) 

On a side note, I got to meet Jeff Blankenburg, the new Heart Land District Developer Evangelist and also got to catch up with people like Darrell Hawley, Josh Holmes and Dave Giard.

Now it’s time to get some sleep because I have to drive back to Cincinnati tomorrow morning.