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On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 7:22 pm, Rick Marshall wrote:
> unibase did this over 20 years ago and can walk the data table
> structures resolving rules over multiple tables etc.
I must have been doing something else at the time and missed that....
my only computers at the time was a PDP/8-11 and some handhelds...
> it works but:
>
> 1. in a general sense we discovered there is no unique solution to some
> problems and the nature of the relationship between nodes is critical to
> a correct calculation (a full descending dom approach would probably
> avoid this problem, but it is not really general and when you factor in
> xquery you will run into very major problems)
> 2. to work well you need to build in a calculus, and then programmers
> tend to fail as the system takes over (ref perma thread on recursion etc)
> 3. depth of calculation becomes a real issue
Yeah but there are some occasions where it would be really helpful
to transmit "safe" formulas within an xml document.
I've seen such a requirement happen only in the last week or two.
It's especially applicable to situations where you have shipping costs
that relate to product weight and size. Including some sort of calculaton
formula for shipping cost would be a really useful thing to have.
I think taking the mathematics to the point where calculus is involved
is going way too far. Good for the mathematicians but bad for the
business analysts.
> 4. and at any rate the original question was really about publishing the
> business rules, not using them.
I don't think the business rules go away. I think including calculations is
all about being able to represent the business rules that exist in certain
situations and transmit them to trading partners.
> to work, the rules will need to exist
> in the context of a schema. personally i think an extension of xsd is
> probably the correct way to do this.
Maybe.. maybe not. I don't agree that you need a schema to be able to
transmit calculation based business rules to trading partners.
As for being "correct"... you're starting to sound a bit like a school
teacher marking assignments for people. I'm just here for lose xml
beer talk... the more beer that's consumed... the better the xml starts
to look... and the day to day problems go away...
David
--
Computergrid : The ones with the most connections win.
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