Two questions about arrays in labels

Question

question

Tee Hiett asked Mar 30, '20 Matthew Gillespie answered Mar 30, '20

Matthew,

I have slightly modified the model you built for me in the posting here. I have a couple of questions related to creating a patient label as an array

1. When I create the label Companions with the Assign Companions & Procedure activity in the flowchart as you did for me, patient.Companions.append(patient) in the activity Patients and Companions Walk to WaitingRoom1 does not throw error messages. When I create the label Companions in the People Settings, the activity patient.Companions.append(patient) does throw error messages.
2.If the patient has 0 or 1 companions, the activity patient.Companions.append(patient) does not put the patient into the array. If the patient has more than one companion, the patient is added to the array. I was expecting the patient to be appended no matter the number of companions.

Thanks for your help.

Software Version:

FlexSim 20.0.3

26689-variablecompanions-2.fsm (75.0 KiB)

5 |100000

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Answer 1 · 2020-03-30T22:58:18Z

Matthew Gillespie answered Mar 30, '20

The labels in the People Settings are special stats labels that the People Tables listen to so that the changes to those label values can be tracked for statistical purposes. However, you have to choose their type up front and then you can't change their type during the model run. So it throws an error message when you try to change that label into an array label, and right now Array isn't one of the types you can choose for these special stat labels.
So I made a mistake on this one. I actually didn't want the original Companions label to be updated. I just wanted to make a temporary array to pass into the travel activities. So what I intended to do in that model was use this line of code:

patient.Companions.clone().push(patient)

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