Bundle data as integer?

[craig_dickson]

[ FlexSim 18.2.2 ]

I am reading a large table from Excel (several actually), and I'll be searching it, so I want to use a bundle for speed. But for some reason it reads all numeric values as double even if they're integers in the original Excel. If I query, I have to make my reference double then, even if they're integers. But if I use a table instead of bundle, they are definitely integers.

Am I missing something or is this just a charcteristic of bndles?

[JordanLJohnson · Accepted solution]

Excel stores values only as doubles. You can format them as integers, but when FlexSim gets the values from Excel, Excel reports them as doubles.

If you use a table instead of a bundle, it means you are storing the data on treenodes, which always store values as a double. The table view formats them as integers, but they are doubles. The treenode does not distinguish between integers and doubles.

Also, if you are searching each row, a bundle is not any faster than a treenode table. The bundle's advantage is that it takes significantly less memory. For memory purposes, if you make a bundle yourself, you can instruct the bundle to store values as integers. However, when you retrieve the value, the bundle will convert it to a double, for compatibility with the rest of FlexSim.

All that being said, in FlexScript, you can easily treat a number as an integer:

int myValue = Table("SomeTable")[3][2];
Table("SomeOtherTable")[2][1] = myValue;
double otherValue = 5.0;
if (otherValue == myValue)
    print("values are equal);

[craig_dickson]

So how does that work if I am doing a query() on the table? The match is going to be an integer by definition, as it is the index for a while loop.

[JordanLJohnson]

When you compare an integer to a double, the integer is upgraded to a double, and then those values are compared. This is true, even inside the query command.