How to inspect why a rule has fired

[Jose Antonio Escribano Ayllon]

Hi,

I have built a debugger to see the state of the facts databaase and to keep track of the rules that fired.

I made use of AddBeforeRuleFiresFunction and AddAfterRuleFiresFunction, and that works pretty nice, but I was wondering if there is any way to inspect why certain rule doesn't fire. 

I guess I can check that on the agenda, but I haven't found any example about that.

Any help?

Cheers,

Jose

[Ryan Johnston]

You may want to `(watch activations)`. `(watch all)` is also helpful. Both will enable debug output at various parts in your CLIPS program. activations will pop up when a rule is "activated" (it is placed on the agenda and will fire when the engine is run) or "deactivated" (a rule's pattern no longer matches a given set of facts, and thus must be removed from the agenda). Check out section 13.2 of the Basic Programming Guide for some more info on stuff you can watch.

What I'll usually do is set up a "known state" by doing `(save my_facts.clp)` so I can quickly `(load my_facts)` and then `(run)` to re-create the issue with different debugging streams watched.

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[Jose Antonio]

Hi Ryan.

Thanks! That is really useful.

And I what if I want to check why a rule does NOT fire? Is there any way to gather that info by using the watch command?

Cheers,

Jose

[CLIPS Support]

Use the matches command. That will show you which patterns have been matched in a rule.

         CLIPS (6.4.1 4/8/23)
CLIPS>
(defrule example
   (a)
   (b)
   (c)
   (d)
   =>)
CLIPS> (assert (a) (b) (d))
<Fact-3>
CLIPS> (agenda)
CLIPS> (matches example)
Matches for Pattern 1
f-1
Matches for Pattern 2
f-2
Matches for Pattern 3
 None
Matches for Pattern 4
f-3
Partial matches for CEs 1 - 2
f-1,f-2
Partial matches for CEs 1 - 3
 None
Partial matches for CEs 1 - 4
 None
Activations
 None
(3 1 0)
CLIPS> 

[Jose Antonio Escribano Ayllon]

Thanks! 

I managed to have it pretty much working.

I was expecting to be able to gather that pretty print debugging in my C++ code, but functions like ListAlphaMatches are writing the info directly into the STDOUT logical name, I suppose there is no way to redirect that to my own logical name right?

I check the documentation but I haven't seen a way to do that.

Cheers,

Jose

[CLIPS Support]

You can create an I/O router to capture output to specific logical names. There are examples in section 9.7 of the Advanced Programming Guide. The CLIPS .NET wrapper makes use of this facility to capture output from STDERR to create exceptions. You could do something similar in your C++ code.

[Jose Antonio Escribano Ayllon]

Thanks, that works perfectly.

Cheers,

Jose