The topic of a rule describes the types, sources, and properties of events coming into the system, and how to pre-filter these events. Topics are logical groupings of events that enable users to better manage multiple event sources by funneling them into one grouping. You then can reference the topic(s) in your rules.

You create rules to look for events by referencing a topic that enables you to group similar event sources within RulePoint. You can write a rule to look at a single event or multiple events with a single property or multiple properties that relate to a single topic or multiple topics.

RulePoint supports pre-filtering in the topic section, which means that you can provide simple, initial filtering before defining the conditions of the rule. For example, if your business process is to look at three events within five minutes, you can write the topic section to wait for these three events before sending the results to the condition section for further processing. If three or more events do not occur during any five‑minute window, RulePoint will not continue to process the rule.

For example, the following rules scan incoming events to identify one stock volume event and two stock share price events: