continue

The continue keyword skips an iteration.

Purpose

A side statement for skipping an iteration.

Context

Rule actions or functions

Syntax

continue;

Description

Use the continue statement in the action part of a rule and in a function to skip an iteration of a while or for loop. This statement forces the rule engine to skip to the next test of the loop statement.

Example

The rule StockDropWarning checks the percent change of a customer’s stocks and issues a warning if a stock price dropped by more than a certain percentage. The condition Client returns an account number in variable ?a and a decimal value percentWarningMark in variable ?p. The second condition, ClientStockList, returns a stock list in variable ?s corresponding to the account number equal to ?a. In the action part of the rule, the while statement iterates over every stock in the stock list ?s. If a stock type is equal to LONG, the continue statement cause the iteration to skip the rest of the statements in the while block and proceed to the while test. If a stock type is not equal to LONG, the difference between the purchase price and the current price is calculated. If the stock price decreased in ?p percent below the purchasePrice, a message is printed.

rule StockDropWarning {
   when {
      ?c:Client(?a:account_number;?p:percentWarningMark);
      ClientStockList(account_number == ?a; ?s:stockList);
   }
   then {
      Enumeration ?enum = ?s.elements();
      while (?enum.hasMoreElements()) {
         Stock ?x = (Stock)enum.nextElement();
         if (?x.type == Stock.LONG)
            continue;
         if ( ((1.-?p)*?x.purchasePrice) > ?x.currentPrice ) {
            System.out.println("Dear "+ ?c.name + " Your stock " 
            + ?x.ticker + " has dropped " + 
            ((?x.purchasePrice - ?x.currentPrice) /
            ?x.purchasePrice ) + " percent.");
         }
      }
   }
};