Recently I have been involved in designing and developing an UI for FlexRule. This application allows people to create rules using drag and drop actions. They can simply drag different elements of the rules and drop them into a document editor and when they save the editor behind generates the rule based on the rule type.

This is a really exciting and challenging project I was involved. Very tricky to design and hart to implement. By the way the designer is almost ready and I can share some screenshots for your.

This rule designer allows different editors be hosted as a different plug-in for it and therefore It supports creating both Procedural and Flow rules with different view. Also if you create your own rule language you will be able to create your own editor and host it inside the designer.

For procedural rules I decided to use a tree like view with different icons for each node to represent different commands of the rule. At first it may look strange when you are creating procedural rules using a tree but
for non-tech users (I mean not programmers) like Business Analysts it would be a good options to create procedural rules on their own.

If you don't like the tree view you can use XML editor to write you procedure code but believe me for a rule it is easier thinking the steps as different nested nodes of a tree instead of a code lines... (at least for non-developers/coders)

The complex part was making an editor for RuleFlow. During opening/creating new rules it will ask to select the type of rule and type of rule viewer/creator;

So simply it allows you to use a diagram based editor for a RuleFlow. Just like procedural rule editor it allows you to create your flow using drag and drop actions;

but for sure you then need to assign properties and values depends on the command type;

and then using transition from toolbox to connect different nodes of the flow

and finally you will have your RuleFlow ready just like this!

Well, that's it for now, I will post more when I have it finished soon.

Hope in two or three more weeks but I think before that I will be off to Sydney for CeBIT!