Action Workflow and global params do not work together

rklec commented 3 months ago

STR

Let's say you have this action workflow:

{
  "$schema": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/RulesEngine/main/schema/workflow-schema.json",
  "WorkflowName": "MailEvaluationWorkflow",
  "GlobalParams": [
    {
      "Name": "myFavouriteThing",
      "Expression": "1"
    }
  ],
  // some action workflow rules here

What happens

This will always fail, if you have at least two rules, with an exception like this:

Exception: Error while executing rule : SecondRuleName - An item with the same key has already been added. Key: myFavouriteThing, ActionResult.Output: null

What should happen

IMHO this makes GlobalParams absolutely useless, as you cannot use them. It should just inject them once

In a basic workflow this works fine, so this only affects the action workflow.

More information

I have found https://github.com/microsoft/RulesEngine/issues/259, which seems to be about the same issue(?), where filtering etc. was introduced. However, IMHO, this is still not a good way to handle it, is it?

Because come on, what use case does GlobalParams even have then? You cannot use them in any way if you have two rules, unless you do some filtering, which really is kinda silly to then always filter, is it?

Workaround

Apparently just define all global params as "local params" in your first rule, which is passed to all others unless you filter. This kinda makes them "global" IMHO and is not a good naming and for me at least was totally confusing. And I had to read and understand the issue here first to get why this happens.

System

RulesEngine v5.0.3

Copied from https://github.com/microsoft/RulesEngine/issues/626 as I highly suspect it affects this fork as well.

asulwer commented 3 months ago

@rklec please review the code below to see how it compares to the error you are experiencing. i created this workflow with two action rules. first one fails, second one is successful.

var workflows = new Workflow[] {    
    new() {
        WorkflowName = "Test Workflow3",
        GlobalParams = new List<ScopedParam> {
            new ScopedParam {
                Name = "GPExpress",
                Expression = "1"
            }
        },
        Rules = new List<Rule> {
            new() {
                RuleName = "Test Rule 1",
                Expression = "GPExpress < 0",
                Actions = new RuleActions {
                    OnSuccess = new ActionInfo {
                        Name = "OutputExpression",
                        Context = new Dictionary<string, object> {{"expression", "GPExpress"}}
                    }
                }
            },
            new() {
                RuleName = "Test Rule 2",
                Expression = "GPExpress >= 0",
                Actions = new RuleActions {
                    OnSuccess = new ActionInfo {
                        Name = "OutputExpression",
                        Context = new Dictionary<string, object> {{"expression", "GPExpress"}}
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
};

asulwer commented 2 months ago

@rklec have you had a chance to review the code that i posted?

asulwer / RulesEngine