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Hello,

I have a rather complex shopping cart system which needs to be able to figure out a lot of things about the prices of the items in a user's cart. I need the system to updatable by somebody that knows less about the system than me. I think that the best way to do this is if I could provide a configuation system that encodes a series of rules about the system in a document that is seperate from the actual program. Here are some examples of the kinds of things I want to encode:

Widgets cost $250
Gizmos cost $125
All customers that have had at least three orders from us in the past get a 20% discount.
Buy 3 Widgets and we'll throw in a Gizmo for free.
Certain classes of customers get 50% off. (This is applied before the 20% discount)
Buy at least 10 Gizmos, and we'll reduce the cost by $30 per unit (This applies after the 50% discount if they get it, but before the 20% discount if they get that).
If you buy the service agreement that goes along with the Widgets during this month, we'll sell you the first year of the agreement for free when you sign up for at least a three year agreement.

This seems to me like it could become very confusing, and very ad-hoc in a short period of time. I really hate to re-invent the wheel on this sort of thing (especially when it is a very large wheel). I was wondering if there were any formats that people have already come up with for defining rules in systems like these? I looked through CPAN, but nothing really jumped out at me.

Thanks in advance for any pointers.

In reply to Seeking configuration language for rules based system. by ehdonhon

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