HI Steve

It is not possible to have a rule "outside" of a form. However, you can perform logic and/or data processing "outside" of the form by building your own service brokers and then calling smartobject methods in form rules.

As an example have a look at the SmartForms Extension Service on the Market, which allows you to do things like perform complex form validations using C# code.

Steve, 

Please provide more information about what you are doing, so we can have a better sense of the help you would like. 

To make one of my forms use less rules, I have written stored procedures in Transact-SQL, to only return the data needed, and nothing more. I did all the sorting and filtering on the SQL side, and created a Smartobject out of the stored procedure. This eliminats quite a lot of rules in Smartforms to do the sorting and filtering. But I have no idea if you are using SQL ,  Sharepoint, or Oracle, etc. etc. If you can provide more details about your environment, you can get a more detailed response. 

And if the SQL Stored Procedure would help you, link:Stored Procedure

Create a smartobject  Create a Service Instance and SmartObject using the SmartObject Service Tester