I am trying to enable the use of DMN in a business. With the current way of working, that is very hard. Let me elaborate.

A decision table is the main part of the rules. The current DMN editor in vscode is too complicated for the business person in charge of the rules. So Excel is used as an editor for the decision table. Excel supports filtering and sorting of rows in a table. It also supports the use of enumerations in cells. This is done by specifying named lists of valid content for cells in specific columns. Very convenient and the business person is used to these features in Excel.

As DMN modeller I recieve the excel file and have to make these rules into code. The first step is to use the Excel2DMN utility to get a .dmn file. Currently I have to preproces the excel file. I have to delete the sheet that contains the definitions of the named lists. In order not to break the original, I manually copy the Excel file and do the preprocessing.

Then I run the utility.

Then I have to do some postprocessing on the .dmn file: I have to manually specify all types, because there is currently no way to specify those in the Excel file itself. (See issue DROOLS-7222)

Some of the values used in the excel sheet are not readily available as input parameters. They come from a DMN Business Knowlege Model using functions. These functions are already specified in another .dmn file. It is very combersome to knit all these things together. For this reason I would like to be able to include a model without changing the namespace. I would like to have a .dmn file that contains whatever I specify in DMN and include the generated-from-excel file to act as a single file.

Whenever the rules in Excel change, I have to do all of the above over and over again, which is too combersome and thus errorprone. I would like to have a way to just generate the .dmn file from the excel file and 'use' the decision tables as a kind of plugin.