OpenRules Release 5.4.0 introduces several important changes.

The Decision Model Primer. OpenRules 5.4.0 includes a new standard project "DecisionModelPrimer" that supports the Decision Model recently introduced by a quickly gaining popularity new book of Barbara von Halle and Larry Goldberg. You may read about the Executable Decision Model and try its live primer from here. OpenRules plans to make further enhancements that will allow a user to enforce and better support 15 principles of the decision model development presented in this book.

Access to Password Protected Excel Files. OpenRules 5.4.0 switches to a new stable release 3.6 of the underlying Apache POI software.  It supports such features as password-protection. So, now OpenRules Engine may access encrypted Excel workbooks by calling the following method just before creating an engine instance:

               OpenRulesEngine.setCurrentUserPassword("password");

Instead of "password" you should use the actual password that protects your main and/or other Excel files. Only one password may be used by all protected Excel files that will be processed by one instance of the OpenRulesEngine created after this call. This call does not affect an access to unprotected files. A new standard project "HelloJavaProtected" provides an example of the protected Excel file - use the word "password" to access the file "HelloCustomer.xls".

OpenRules 5.4.0 still does not support new Open XML file formats (for files with an extension .xlsx) introduced in MS Office 2007 but we plan to do in the next release. 

From the installation perspective, your should replace your configuration project "openrules.config" with a new one that replaced the old jar poi-3.2-FINAL-20081029.jar  with poi-3.6-20091214.jar. If some of your own projects directly refer to the old POI jar please make the proper change.

OpenRules Release 5.4.0 also adds several enhancements and fixes newly found bugs:

1. We improved a mechanism that automatically differentiate between vertical and horizontal rule tables to prevent difficult to understand occasional syntax errors in rules tables

2. Extended Operators in the com.openrules.tools to use expressions such as "is", "isNot" or "is more than".

3. We have fixed a bug introduced in the release 5.3.1 when several instances of OpenRulesEngine are created based on the different xls-files executed identical methods

4. We have fixed a bug in the interpretation of "natural" language intervals (predefined FromToInt and FromToDouble types). There was a mistake in some situations when the second bound in the expression "from - to" is negative.

You may download the latest OpenRules release 5.4.0 from www.openrules.com/download.htm.