This is a very minor issue that's only related to the GUI:
When selecting a constraint from "Space -> Rooms -> A room's not available times", a dialog shows up that allows entering all the properties of that constraint. One of these properties is titled "Weight percentage (recommended: 0.0%-100.0%)". However, when entering "0" to that field, an error message shows up saying "Invalid weight". Specifying "0.1" as weight is working fine.
Hence, I would suggest to either change the title of that field to "Weight percentage (recommended: 0.1%-100.0%)" or to change the validation code to accept the value of 0%.
Btw.: I don't think that "recommended" is even the right word here, since 0.1-100.0 is not a recommendation but the interval of permitted values.
0% weight means the constraint is useless. I guess even 0.01% would also work. So Weight percentage (Allowed is: (0-100.0]) would be fine.
(0 to 100] means any value between 0 to 100 and including 100. This is the "math" style of representing a range ;D
I would recommend accepting 0% as weight. I wouldn't call such a constraint useless but disabled. In fact, when playing with different sets of constraints, I usually set the weight to 0% for disabling it.
Quote from: math on June 12, 2019, 11:18:30 AM
In fact, when playing with different sets of constraints, I usually set the weight to 0% for disabling it.
You can simply deactivate it in all space constraints. No need to change to '0%'
Deactivation is only possible in the all space constraints dialog, not in all the other dialogs. I usually avoid this dialog since I have to deal with a big number of entries here, so that I first have to find the entries I'm interested in.
Imho, I don't think that it is a big issue that there are two ways of disabling a constraint. When starting a timetable generation, the solver first could check all the constraints, treating all 0% weight contraints as if they were disabled.
I would leave this decision to Liviu or who may be concerned.
hmmm...
i must admit that i sometimes also use 0% weight (with min n day constraint). i know myself that it is useless, but i like that, because
a) i can still see very easy how many times this (very minor) constraint is broken
b) it reminds me a bit more to tun on that constraint (maybe) later. the "big" problem is that i sometimes decrease the weight, because it is not possible with the current dataset, but i want to turn it on again next year. The problem with deactivating/deleting is that the risk is pretty high that i will forget that one year later.
so i prefer so "enable" 0% in all constraints, even it is useless. But Liviu is in charge to decide.
Thank you, math, for the bug report! I don't know why this happens. I will check and hope to fix it for the next version, to be released soon (hopefully in a few days). Now I am a bit tired and out of time - I hope tomorrow (in fact today, in Romania :) )
math, I have released a new snapshot with the fix. Please check the Snapshots board and confirm the problem is gone.
You are right that it is the permitted interval, not the recommended values, but it is too late to change now.