Hooks and Reactive Execution

Some laws apply to every government decision without being called explicitly. The General Administrative Law Act (Algemene wet bestuursrecht, Awb) is the main example: whenever any government body issues a formal decision (beschikking), Awb rules about reasoning requirements, objection periods, and notification deadlines kick in automatically.

The law that triggers these rules does not know about the Awb. The Awb does not know about that specific law. They are decoupled by design.

How hooks work

An article can declare a hooks block. This tells the engine: “fire this article whenever the conditions in applies_to match.”

When the Zorgtoeslagwet calculates a healthcare allowance and produces a beschikking, this Awb hook fires and adds bezwaartermijn_weken: 6 to the result. The Zorgtoeslagwet does not mention the Awb or objection periods.

Hook points

Hooks can fire at two moments during article execution:

• pre_actions - after open term resolution, before the article’s own logic runs. Used for prerequisites like the Awb reasoning requirement (3:46): the decision must include a motivation.
• post_actions - after the article’s logic completes. Used for consequences like the objection period (6:7) and notification deadlines (6:8).

The produces annotation

For hooks to fire, the target article must declare what kind of legal product it produces:

The engine builds a hook index at load time. When it encounters an article with a produces annotation, it checks the index for matching hooks and fires them.

A hook can also apply to an application instead of a decision: applies_to.submission: AANVRAAG fires on every article whose produces says it establishes one (RFC-045). Awb 4:2 and 4:13 work this way; see Chronolexography. When that article also decides on the application, produces lists the two, and a hook matches the item whose type it names. A staged run then fires the hooks on the application at the stage named after the kind, AANVRAAG, and the hooks on the decision at their own stages (RFC-047).

The objection-deadline chain

Awb hooks compose into a chain:

1. Awb 3:46 (pre_actions hook, stage: BESLUIT) - sets motivering_vereist: true
2. The target law’s article runs and produces the decision
3. Awb 6:7 (post_actions hook, stage: BESLUIT) - sets bezwaartermijn_weken: 6
4. Later, when the decision is communicated (stage: BEKENDMAKING):
5. Awb 6:8 (post_actions hook, stage: BEKENDMAKING) - calculates bezwaartermijn_startdatum and bezwaartermijn_einddatum based on the notification date and the 6-week period from Awb 6:7

Overrides (lex specialis)

Sometimes a specific law overrides a general Awb rule. The Aliens Act (Vreemdelingenwet) article 69 says: “in afwijking van artikel 6:7 Awb bedraagt de termijn vier weken” (“departing from Awb article 6:7, the period is four weeks”).

This is modeled with overrides:

The Awb does not know it is being overridden. The Vreemdelingenwet unilaterally replaces the value. This only applies when the Vreemdelingenwet is part of the execution chain (a Participatiewet case is not affected by this override).

Voiding an output

An override can also say that the output does not arise at all, rather than being replaced by another value:

This distinction is legal, not technical. “Bestaat geen aanspraak” is not an entitlement of zero: an entitlement of zero is still a decision, so it carries legal remedies and a ground for recovery, and no entitlement carries neither. Writing a void as value: 0 would erase that difference. The engine reads the flag and needs no knowledge of administrative law to act on it.

An override of another law’s output applies only inside an execution that the overriding law started, as above. An article overriding an output of its own law is a different claim: there is no other law to protect from, so it applies whenever that law runs. Without that, the outcome would depend on the route in, and an amount the statute says does not arise would still be handed out when a third law read the output directly. voids is what exposed this, but the rule is about same-law versus cross-law and holds for a replacement too. See RFC-041 for the amendment it makes to the contextual-law rule.

Reading the value an override departs from

A special rule often states its departure in terms of the general rule. Take an (illustrative) article saying “in afwijking van artikel 2 van de Wet op de zorgtoeslag wordt de zorgtoeslag met tien procent verhoogd”. The overriding article reads the very output it replaces:

That read is the general rule’s value, computed with this override held back, and the override applies once. The same holds for an article that implements an open term of a law and reads that law: it reads the law without its own filling, which is the next implementation or the default. A voids override is not included: reading a voided output still yields the void.

A replacing override takes effect where the overridden article sets the output, so the article’s own actions that read it see the replaced value, like every other reader: a monthly amount derived from hoogte_zorgtoeslag in the same article follows the raised amount. The article runs its actions in dependency order, so where an action stands in the file never changes which value it reads; only the assignments of an output that is set more than once keep their order among themselves. An override may read the inputs of the article it overrides, but not its other outputs: the engine refuses that, because which of them were already set would depend on the order of the actions in the file. A name that is both an input and an output of that article is the input to the override, except the replaced output itself, which the override receives as the article computed it.

How overrides differ from IoC

Administrative procedure stages

A beschikking takes shape over time, moving through stages: application, review, decision, notification, objection. Hooks bind to specific stages via applies_to.stage.

The Awb defines a procedure lifecycle:

The engine yields between stages, returning accumulated outputs and indicating what inputs are needed for the next stage. The engine itself stays stateless; the procedure state is managed externally.

Further reading

• Cross-Law References - how laws reference each other explicitly
• Inversion of Control - how a law leaves a value to another regulation
• Traceability - how hook and override nodes appear in an execution trace
• Temporal Validity and Dates - the date arithmetic behind the objection-deadline chain
• RFC-007: Cross-Law Execution - hooks and overrides specification
• RFC-008: Bestuursrecht/Awb - the administrative procedure model
• Rules as Executed, section 4.9 - the position paper’s four execution modes, with the hook as the declared trigger of the reactive one