Wave composition rules
Handling rules are about goods. These are about the order: whether it may join an automatic wave, whether it must travel alone, and how big that wave may get at all.
Stockly → Warehouses → Rules → Wave composition.
Three verdicts
Section titled “Three verdicts”Admit : the default; the order joins a wave as usual.
Never in a wave : the order does not join an automatic wave at all. This is the case for goods a shop packs at a separate bench.
Its own wave : the order may go out, but only with orders the same rule claimed. This is how a requirement such as pallet goods travelling on their own trolley is expressed without a second kind of wave.
A wave belongs to a rule only when every order in it was claimed by that rule. A single ordinary order in it makes the wave mixed, and it then belongs to no rule.
Three ceilings
Section titled “Three ceilings”The limits are on the wave, not on the order. An order larger than the limit would otherwise be unpickable for ever, so the limit stops the wave growing rather than refusing the order.
| Ceiling | Counts |
|---|---|
| Max weight per wave (kg) | the summed weight of the orders in the wave |
| Max bulky lines per wave | lines marked as bulky |
| the wave size | units or orders, whichever the rule names |
The first two are the fields on this screen. The third is carried by the rule and honoured by the planner, but the form has no box for it: it is written through the API, and a rule that says nothing about it leaves the built-in default in place.
Zero and an empty field both mean that no limit applies, rather than a limit of zero. An empty numeric field in the admin frequently arrives as zero, and interpreting it as a limit would disable picking unintentionally.
The ceiling sizes a wave that the module composes itself. A list of orders selected manually is taken in full: trimming a selection to fifty units would return fewer orders than were selected, without a visible reason. The only bound in that case is the API’s own limit of five hundred orders per call.
An unknown weight passes for free
Section titled “An unknown weight passes for free”An order whose weight is not known is admitted and adds 0 kg to the total. This is deliberate: rejecting orders with an unknown weight would empty waves for a reason that cannot be read from the result.
This has a consequence for the ceiling. An order’s weight is unknown when any single line of it has no weight, so in a catalogue without weights the weight ceiling applies only partially. Weights in the catalogue are a precondition for that ceiling to have any effect.
The size ceiling applies where the weight ceiling does not: it counts every order, including the ones that were never weighed. The two do not overlap.
Where the wave ceiling comes from
Section titled “Where the wave ceiling comes from”The ceiling is set by the rule that claimed the order leading the wave. The queue is already in priority order by then, so this is the highest-priority order in it. When no rule states a value, the built-in default applies: 50 units.
It is not necessary to return to the version in which this setting was on the configuration card: a shop that had a different value there had it written as a rule during the update.