Advice
An advice construct has the following form:
Advice <simple-identifier> : <function-invocation>
Each advice construct consists of an identifier (the advice name) and a call to the function
dtcMessage (see
Miscellaneous Functions). Each advice construct ends with a line break, and line breaks are allowed between parameters of the function call. The cost engine executes an advice construct only when at least one of the following is true:
• Some rule with a matching name evaluates to false.
• Some advice rule with a matching name evaluates to true.
When the cost engine evaluates an advice construct, it evaluates the function invocation, and appends the result, a
dtcMessage object, to the list of
dtcMessage objects for the current process routing.
dtcMessage objects contain information about the context in which the associated rule failed or in which the associated advice rule succeeded; this information is used to populate the Design to Cost panels in the aPriori Professional interface (see Design to Cost in the aPriori Professional
User Guide). For more information on
DtcMessage objects, see
dtcMessage in
Miscellaneous Functions.
If a rule or advice rule has more than one matching advice construct, an error occurs when the module is saved.
See the following sections for information on each syntactic category mentioned above: