Understanding how Corticon Studio handles collections

Support for using collections is extensive in Corticon Studio – in fact, the integration of collection support in the Rules Language is so seamless and complete, the rule modeler will often discover that rules are performing multiple evaluations on collections of data beyond what he/she anticipated! This is partly the point of a declarative environment – the rule modeler need only be concerned with what the rules do, rather than how they do it. How the system actually iterates or cycles through all the available data during rule execution should not be of concern.

As we saw in previous examples, a rule with term FlightPlan.aircraft was evaluated for every instance of FlightPlan.aircraft data delivered to the rule, either by an XML message or by a Ruletest (which are really the same thing, as the Ruletest simply serves as a quick and convenient way to create XML payloads and send them to the rules). A rule is expressed in Corticon Studio the same way regardless of how many instances of data are to be evaluated by it – contrast this to more traditional procedural programming techniques, where for-do or while-next type looping syntax is often required to ensure all relevant data is evaluated by the logic.