13.27. The Conditional Element Accumulate

The Conditional Element accumulate is a more flexible and powerful form of collect, in the sense that it can be used to do what collect does and also achieve results that the CE collect is not capable of doing. It allows a rule to iterate over a collection of objects, executing custom actions for each of the elements. At the end it returns a result object.

Accumulate supports both the use of pre-defined accumulate functions, or the use of inline custom code. Inline custom code should be avoided though, as it is harder for rule authors to maintain, and frequently leads to code duplication. Accumulate functions are easier to test and reuse.

The Accumulate CE also supports multiple different syntaxes. The preferred syntax is the top level accumulate, as noted bellow, but all other syntaxes are supported for backward compatibility.