How to return array type from User Command

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BenJoaquin Gouverneur asked Oct 18 2016 at 1:08 AM BenJoaquin Gouverneur commented Oct 19 2016 at 7:39 PM

How to return array type from User Command

Hi folks,

My colleague @Will Bishop and I are building out a collection of custom User Commands to support our work. We have several commands related to interacting with global tables and are working on commands to make working with arrays easier.

I'd like to build a command for removing a matched element from an array and a separate one for adding an element to a given index location. To do both of these I need the command to return the various array types. I'm able to pass arrays into commands but get a type error if I try to assign an array returned from a command. Is there a way to do this or is this an inherent limitation in FlexScript?

Software Version:

FlexSim 16.2.0

flexscript array user command

· 3

Axel Kohonen commented · Oct 19 2016 at 4:46 AM

Hi @BenJoaquin Gouverneur

There is also a user command return type called numarray that you can use that accepts intarray and doublearray. However, using var as the return type is more flexible.

Axel

1 ·

svmes.png (13.2 KiB)

BenJoaquin Gouverneur Axel Kohonen commented · Oct 19 2016 at 7:39 PM

@Axel Kohonen and @Matt Long great info! Everything is working now. You guys are the best!

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Matt Long commented · Oct 18 2016 at 7:51 PM

Prior to version 7.7 you had to return numbers from a user command and use the tonum() and tonode() commands in order to return a treenode. Starting in 7.7 you can return all types from a user command including arrays.

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Answer 1 · 2016-10-18T13:23:45Z

Matt Long answered Oct 18 2016 at 1:23 PM Matt Long commented Oct 19 2016 at 1:41 PM

Without seeing your code I can't tell you exactly what you're doing wrong, but here's a simple user command that removes a value from a couple different types of arrays. Keep in mind this command is not very robust as it doesn't do any kind of dummy checking, but you should get the idea.

var theArray = param(1);
var removeVal = param(2);
 
 
int size = arraysize(theArray);
int index = 1;
 
 
switch (getvartype(theArray)) {
	case VAR_TYPE_TREENODEARRAY: {
		treenodearray oldArray = theArray;
		treenodearray newArray = makearray(size - 1);
		for (int i = 1; i <= size; i++) {
			if (oldArray[i] != removeVal) {
				newArray[index] = oldArray[i];
				index++;
			}
		}
		return newArray;
	}
	case VAR_TYPE_INTARRAY: {
		intarray oldArray = theArray;
		intarray newArray = makearray(size - 1);
		for (int i = 1; i <= size; i++) {
			if (oldArray[i] != removeVal) {
				newArray[index] = oldArray[i];
				index++;
			}
		}
		return newArray;
	}
}

And some example code of using it:

treenodearray testArray = makearray(3);
fillarray(testArray, node("Source1", model()), node("Source2", model()), node("Source3", model()));
return removeFromArray(testArray, node("Source2", model()));
 
intarray testArray = makearray(3);
fillarray(testArray, 1, 2, 3);
return removeFromArray(testArray, 2);

(As a side not, you can look forward to FlexSim 2017 where dealing with arrays will become quite a bit easier...)

removefromarray.png (32.1 KiB)

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