How to prevent a rule to be triggered inside a rule?

Question

I'm using the Rules module and I have two rules:

• A: When flagged, 'Post a journal entry to the ledger'
• B: When unflagged, 'Remove journal entry from the ledger'

Rule A includes also two Rules components with conditions that check if the journal entry is balanced:

If the condition 'balanced' is true: - Post journal entry to the ledger.

If the condition 'unbalanced' is true: - Show a warning on the page and UNFLAG the journal entry.

The problem is that I don't want the Rule B to be triggered inside rule A, which currently happens.

Theoretically I could add a condition to Rule B like 'is balanced' but I don't want to modify other rules in order to prevent the execution of a rule inside a rule.

Is it possible to prevent nested Rules from firing?

Answer 1

This is a workaround solution.

You could add a boolean field to your journal entry content type. Side note, you could use the Field Permission module to hide the boolean field from the add/edit form.

Alternatively, if you're not using the sticky system, you could use that instead.

So now all you gotta do is add a condition to your Unflag Rule.

• Boolean is false/unchecked OR content is unsticky.

---

Now in your Component Action add:

• Set a data value and make your boolean True/checked OR Make content sticky
• Unflag node
• Set a data value and make your boolean false/unchecked OR Make content unsticky

Voilà!!! your component will not trigger your unflag rule.

Answer 2

You may get closer (= simplify your Rules logic) by ALSO using the Conditional Rules module. Some more details about this module (from its project page):

... provides Rules plugins for conditionally altering execution flow directly inside a group of actions.

Here is a screenprint of a rule with an action that uses Conditional Rules (though only with an "if"-part here, no "else"):

For a sample using the Conditional Rules module (for which there is not a lot of docu available), refer to my answer to the question "How to prevent a node being saved when using the Rules module?".

Be aware: this module only has a beta release for D7, though it's used in over 8K sites (which makes it seem like a pretty robust module though).

Answer 3

Sometime you need to prevent the next rules from executing.

• In your rule, you can add an action "Execute custom PHP code"

You can put this code to redirect to a different page rightaway without execute the next rule.

-------------------------
header("location:/");
exit;
--------------------------

The above code will do a page redirect to the home page and that's it.

The rest of the rules will never get execute.