Condition Stubs

Conditions are the primary ingredient of a decision table as they represent the conditions to evaluate for logical completeness. Conditions are entered in the Condition Stub area of a decision table. When LogicGem is used as a programmer's tool, these stubs are presumed to contain syntactically meaningful target source language expressions. The result of a LogicGem compile operation is then compilable by a destination language compiler. Pseudo code or English language type of expressions may also be used here, if you choose to use LogicGem as a business rule tool.

A maximum of 15 condition stubs can be entered in one decision table. Each condition stub entry can be up to 1,024 characters in length. The following process shows how to enter condition stubs:
  1. Click the mouse in the small empty area to the right of the Condition Label C1, and an arrowhead points to the area.
  2. Enter in the first condition and a pencil icon will replace the arrowhead.
  3. Click the mouse in the next blank condition space beside the asterisk, to enter the next condition. As each condition is committed it is labeled in ascending sequence as C1, C2, C3, … , C15.
  4. Repeat step 3 to enter each condition.
The number of condition stubs determines the number of rules (columns) that must be accounted for during the decision table creation process. The more conditions, also results in a higher Completion Ratio value. Since each condition represents a binary value, the number of rules to be accounted for is always a power of 2 (2n where n is the number of conditions). For example, a decision table with three conditions requires you to account for 8 rules (23), and a table with 15 conditions requires you to consider 32,768 rules (215).