DMN13 — notion of arbitrary order conflicts with lack of an unordered collection data type

Section "8.2.11 Hit policy" describes that hit policy "Collect: returns all hits in arbitrary order". This implies that the order of the results does not have to be deterministic and can also vary among different implementations. However, the standard only supports the notion of 'lists', which do have an order. The comparison of lists is also specified in a way that the order of elements is significant. The issue might get more clear when thinking about testing the interface of decisions. Strictly speaking, it is currently not feasible to define a test against a decision table with hit policy 'collect'. The expected result can only be defined using a list, whose elements do have an order. The operator to compare the 'expected' and the 'actual' result will also take order into account.

The issue could easily be resolved by replacing 'arbitrary order' with 'rule order'.

RTF 1.3 is ending

Thank you for reporting the issue; it is likely valid but unfortunately the DMN 1.3 revision task force ran out of time before a member was able to resolve it. The issue will be deferred to the next revision task force.