Expertsystemen

 

Introduction to repeating

In this part, you’re going to learn another trick that can be of great use in the making of models: repeats. We advise you to finish the guided tour first. It is also advisable to be familiar with model structure.

As its name implies, repeats enable us to repeat certain parts of the model. Normally, after the end user has completed the actions in one node, he or she would go on to the next node. What loops do is repeating this node a set number of times, before going on to the rest of the model. You can re-use this repeat later in the model. To clarify, let’s take a look at an example.

Imagine the following scenario: I am the owner of a company, and I want one document in which I can find all the basic information of my employees. Right now, I might already have this information, but it is scattered over several documents. To start, I have set up a very simple model in which the user is asked for the employee’s name, date of birth and salary. Pay attention to which node has what actions. Be sure not to forget to put a text fragment in the finish node of the main graph. otherwise your repeat won’t work!

setting up the graph we're going to repeat
setting up the graph we’re going to repeat

These questions are all stored in a separate graph I added, named “person”. But the most essential part of the repeat is found in the main branch of the decision tree.

What I am talking about here is the question that determines how many times the user will pass through the repeat. In my case, it is the question named “number”, which asks how many employees are working at my company. We will use this number in the repeat.

In the next pages we will discuss and explain more about repeating.