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Behavior Rules

Overview

Behavior Rules are the decision-making engine in EDDI's Lifecycle Pipeline. They are IF-THEN rules that evaluate conversation state and trigger actions based on conditions. This is where you define when to call an LLM, when to invoke an API, and how your agent responds to user inputs.

Role in the Lifecycle

In EDDI's processing pipeline, Behavior Rules sit between input parsing and action execution:

User Input → Parser → Behavior Rules → API/LLM Calls → Output Generation

Behavior Rules examine the conversation memory (including parsed input, context data, and conversation history) and decide:

  • Which actions to trigger
  • Whether to call an LLM or skip it
  • Whether to make external API calls
  • What output to generate

Key Concepts

  • Rules are IF-THEN logic: If all conditions match, execute the specified actions
  • Rules are grouped: Multiple rules can be organized into groups for better structure
  • Sequential execution: Rules within a group execute in order until one succeeds
  • First match wins: Once a rule in a group succeeds, remaining rules in that group are skipped
  • Actions trigger other lifecycle tasks: Actions like httpcall(weather-api) or send_to_llm activate other parts of the pipeline

Behavior Rules Structure

Behavior Rules are very flexible in structure to cover most use cases that you will come across. Behavior Rules are clustered in Groups. Behavior Rules are executed sequentially within each Group. As soon as one Behavior Rule succeeds, all remaining Behavior Rules in this Group will be skipped.

Groups

{
  "behaviorGroups": [
    {
      "name": "GroupName",
      "behaviorRules": [
        {
          "name": "RuleName",
          "actions": [
            "action-to-be-triggered"
          ],
          "conditions": [
            <CONDITIONS>
          ]
        },
        {
          "name": "DifferentRule",
          "actions": [
            "another-action-to-be-triggered"
          ],
          "conditions": [
            <CONDITIONS>
          ]
        },
        <MORE_RULES>
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Type of Conditions

Each Behavior Rule has a list of conditions, that, depending on the condition , might have a list of sub-conditions.

If all conditions are true, then the Behavior Rule is successful and it will trigger predefined actions.

List of available conditions:

General Structure

conditions are always children of either a Behavior Rule or another condition. It will always follows that same structure.

Description of condition structure

Input Matcher

The inputmatcher is used to match user inputs. Not directly the real input of the user, but the meaning of it, represented by expressions that are resolved from by the parser.

Description

Element Value Description
type inputmatcher
configs expressions

comma separated list of

expressions such as:

expression(value),expression2(value2),

yetAnotherExpressions(anotherValue(withASubValue))
occurrence

currentStep - used in case if the user said it in this conversationStep

lastStep - used in case if the user said it in the previous conversationStep

anyStep - used in case if the user said it in any step if this whole conversation

never - used in case if the user has never said that, including the current step

If the user would type "hello", and the parser resolves this as expressions "greeting(hello)" [assuming it has been defined in one of the dictionaries], then a condition could look as following in order to match this user input meaning:

(...)
  "conditions": [
    {
      "type": "inputmatcher",
      "configs": {
        "expressions": "greeting(*)",
        "occurrence": "currentStep"
      }
    }
  ]
(...)

This inputmatcher condition will match any expression of type greeting, may that be "greeting(hello)", "greeting(hi)" or anything else. Of course, if you would want to match greeting(hello) explicitly, you would put "greeting(hello)" as value for the "expressions" field.

Context Matcher

The contextmatcher is used to match context data that has been handed over to EDDI alongside the user input. This is great to check certain conditions that come from another system, such as the day time or to check the existence of user data.

Description

Element Value Description
type contextmatcher
configs contextKey The key for this context (defined when handing over context to EDDI)
contextType

expressions

object

string
expressions (if contextType=expressions) A list of comma separated expressions

objectKeyPath (if contextType=object)

objectValue

Allows match via Jsonpath, such as "profile.username" (see: https://github.com/rest-assured/rest-assured/wiki/Usage)

Exp: contextKey: userInfo , contextValue: {"profile":{"username":"John"}} The value to be match with the extracted JsonPath value
string string matching (equals)

Examples

(...)
  "conditions": [
    {
      "type": "contextmatcher",
      "configs": {
        "contextType": "expressions",
        "contextKey": "someContextName",
        "expressions": "contextDataExpression(*)"
      }
    }
  ]
(...)

(...)
  "conditions": [
    {
      "type": "contextmatcher",
      "configs": {
        "contextType": "object",
        "contextKey": "userInfo",
        "objectKeyPath": "profile.username",
        "objectValue": "John"
      }
    }
  ]
(...)

(...)
  "conditions": [
    {
      "type": "contextmatcher",
      "configs": {
        "contextType": "string",
        "contextKey": "daytime",
        "string": "night"
      }
    }
  ]
(...)

Connector

The connector is there to all logical OR conditions within rules. By default all conditions are AND conditions, but in some cases it might be suitable to connect conditions with a logical OR.

Description

Element Value
type connector
values operator (either AND or OR)

Examples

(...)
  "conditions": [
    {
      "type": "connector",
      "configs": {
        "operator": "OR"
      },
      "conditions": [
        <any other conditions>
      ]
    }
  ]
(...)

Negation

Inverts the overall outcome of the children conditions

In some cases it is more relevant if a condition is false than if it is true, this is where the negation condition comes into play. The logical result of all children together (AND connected), will be inverted.

Example:

Child 1 - true
Child 2 - true
→ Negation = false
Child 1 - false
Child 2 - true
→ Negation = true

(...)
  "conditions": [
    {
      "type": "negation",
      "conditions": [
        <any other conditions>
      ]
    }
  ]
(...)

Occurrence

Defines the occurrence/frequency of an action in a Behavior Rule.

(...)
{
  "type": "occurrence",
  "configs": {
    "maxTimesOccurred": "0",
    "minTimesOccurred": "0",
    "behaviorRuleName": "Welcome"
  }
}
(...)

Dependency

Check if another Behavior Rule has met it's condition or not in the same conversationStep. Sometimes you need to know if a rule has succeeded , dependency will take that rule that hasn't been executed yet in a sandbox environment as a reference for an other behavior rule.

(...)
{
  "type": "dependency",
  "configs": {
    "reference": "<name-of-another-behavior-rule>"
  }
}
(...)

Action Matcher

As inputMatcher doesn't look at expressions but it looks for actions instead, imagine a Behavior Rule has been triggered and you want to check if that action has been triggered before.

(...)
{
  "type": "actionmatcher",
  "configs": {
    "actions": "show_available_products",
    "occurrence": "lastStep"
  }
}
(...)

Dynamic Value Matcher

This will allow you to compile a condition based on any http request/properties or any sort of variables available in EDDI's context.

(...)
  {
  "type": "dynamicvaluematcher",
  "configs": {
    "valuePath": "memory.current.httpCalls.someObj.errors",
    "contains": "partly matching",
    "equals": "needs to be equals"
  }
}
(...)

Size Matcher

This condition type checks the size of arrays or collections in the conversation memory.

(...)
  {
  "type": "sizematcher",
  "configs": {
    "valuePath": "memory.current.httpCalls.results",
    "min": "1",
    "max": "10",
    "equal": "-1"
  }
}
(...)
Config Type Description
valuePath string Path to the array/collection to check
min int Minimum size required (-1 to skip check)
max int Maximum size allowed (-1 to skip check)
equal int Exact size required (-1 to skip check)

The Behavior Rule API Endpoints

The API Endpoints below will allow you to manage the Behavior Rules in your EDDI instance.

The {id} is a path parameters that indicate which behavior rule you want to alter.

API Methods

HTTP Method API Endpoint Request Body Response
DELETE /behaviorstore/behaviorsets/{id} N/A N/A
GET /behaviorstore/behaviorsets/{id} N/A BehaviorSet model
PUT /behaviorstore/behaviorsets/{id} BehaviorSet model N/A
GET /behaviorstore/behaviorsets/descriptors N/A BehaviorSet model
POST /behaviorstore/behaviorsets BehaviorSet model N/A
GET /behaviorstore/behaviorsets/{id}/currentversion N/A BehaviorSet model
POST /behaviorstore/behaviorsets/{id}/currentversion BehaviorSet model N/A

Example

We will demonstrate here the creation of a BehaviorSet

Request URL

POST http://localhost:7070/behaviorstore/behaviorsets

Request Body

{
  "behaviorGroups": [
    {
      "name": "Smalltalk",
      "behaviorRules": [
        {
          "name": "Welcome",
          "actions": [
            "welcome"
          ],
          "conditions": [
            {
              "type": "negation",
              "conditions": [
                {
                  "type": "occurrence",
                  "configs": {
                    "maxTimesOccurred": "1",
                    "behaviorRuleName": "Welcome"
                  }
                }
              ]
            }
          ]
        },
        {
          "name": "Greeting",
          "actions": [
            "greet"
          ],
          "conditions": [
            {
              "type": "inputmatcher",
              "configs": {
                "expressions": "greeting(*)",
                "occurrence": "currentStep"
              }
            }
          ]
        },
        {
          "name": "Goodbye",
          "actions": [
            "say_goodbye",
            "CONVERSATION_END"
          ],
          "conditions": [
            {
              "type": "inputmatcher",
              "configs": {
                "expressions": "goodbye(*)"
              }
            }
          ]
        },
        {
          "name": "Thank",
          "actions": [
            "thank"
          ],
          "conditions": [
            {
              "type": "inputmatcher",
              "configs": {
                "expressions": "thank(*)"
              }
            }
          ]
        },
        {
          "name": "how are you",
          "actions": [
            "how_are_you"
          ],
          "conditions": [
            {
              "type": "inputmatcher",
              "configs": {
                "expressions": "how_are_you"
              }
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Response Body

no content

Response Code

201

The Location response header contains the URI of the newly created resource:

Location: eddi://ai.labs.behavior/behaviorstore/behaviorsets/{id}?version=1