I have noticed and read that the Find Slot activity is very slow in certain situations. I was able to work around this because I knew my slot addresses and used Assign Labels to get the slot I needed.
However, if in a case where a work around is not possible, would it fundamentally be faster to create a List with slots as entries, bays, levels, aisles as fields and use a Pull from List activity?
Is something like that possible? If so, how would you get the slots to be entries on the list?
Slots are by design treenodes in a rack object attribute variables subnode. Then you can push them onto a list. An individual list makes only sense, if you want to manage a much smaller cluster of slots in comparison to all slots of a warehouse. Once you have pushed a treenode onto a list you have to cast this list value into a Storage System Class or you must evaluate bay and level relatively from this slot treenode up in the tree. An Aisle attribute is an Address value, that you can get only from the Storage Class properties.
Thank you for the response Joerg.
How could i push slots to a list? I tried finding all slots and adding them to a label, then pushing the array label but seem to be unsuccessful. Later in the list we would add expressions that reference the value as Storage System and find the required attributes, correct?
What do you mean by aisle is an address value? Could you please show how that could be added to the list fields?
you need query slots to collect all slots or a subset of your model. querySlots returns an array. You can push an array onto a list and each array member creates a list entry or list value. List values loose their class inherited family feature: a slot becomes a treenode. If you add fields by expression to a list then you have to cast a slot treenode list entry value into a Storage.Slot class member to evaluate an address aisle or zone property.
querySlots:
Array slots = Storage.system.querySlots("WHERE slot.storageObject.name = 'PushBackRack1'",0);
token.slots = slots;
Please add a global list to your model and choose this list for your list resource activity.
You can edit list fields from Global List in Toolbox or by Advanced in Quick Properties of List resource activity.
Expression in added list field
value.as(Storage.Slot).bay...
after start typing l e a pop up menu with possible suggestions occurs. you can type more characters or select a suitable method or property.
For speed accessing a large storage system by it's find and query methods, you should use one or more index on the slots and items.
Whenever you use the ORDER BY clause with a large number of returned elements you will slow things down considerably. If you want to choose a random item you might consider just getting the unordered array and selecting a random element from it (hopefully this will be implemented as an standard option in the future)
If that's still not fast enough you could use partitioned lists to reduce the number of elements in each partition and store the slot in the list.
You can add all the slots by pushing the array returned by:
Storage.system.querySlots("")
for which there's an example model attached. pushAllSlotsToList.fsm
You could also consider using a map of the slots.
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