The "active" property is not extracted during ruleset generation, and it is therefore not available to the engine at runtime. In particular this property cannot be used to perform runtime rule selection at the level of a rule task.

However it can be used during ruleset extraction, where an extractor query can use the property value to determine whether to include a rule or not in the generated ruleset. Such query based extractions can be performed either through Rule Studio or through Rule Team Server/Enterprise Console.

Another way of using this property to filter the content of generated rulesets is through the following Rule Studio build option :

Preferences > Rule Studio > Build > build rules for which the "active" property is false

By default all rules are included in the ruleset build and by unselecting the above option the rules for which the "active" property is false will be filtered out.