Inventory in Design (Update)

Turns out that our idea about using the "Inventory Length" settings in Aegis Design will not work.

Here's the problem: selecting only the stocked and available chord lengths caused errors with the Material Summary from the Summary program. The Material Summary normally produces a list of the steel needed for the selected trusses, broken down into one-foot increments. For example, the list will look sort of like this:



However, when we only had 32' checked in the "Inventory Lengths" in Design, Summary would list all these pieces as 32' long. Which then created a significantly higher Total Lineal Feet value. Which caused all sorts of confusion. This also happened for 35, 55, and 725 chords, both USC and USD.

Phil Neely at Aegis says this was not a known issue. We will be trying to re-create this error on both ends, so that Aegis can work on fixing the problem in future releases.

So for now, we are abandoning this experiment. Thanks to Pedro Hernandez for discovering and pointing out the problem.

Update: according to Phil Neely, this is not a bug. It's a feature. The "Inventory Length" code was written to round all lengths up to the nearest available length. This shows up in costing in Design, and well as on the Material Summary.

Given that information from Aegis, I'm not sure what purpose the "Inventory Length" tool has. I don't see any advantage to using it.