Master scheduling run for All Items not picking up level 0 items

Master scheduling had been working fine for a number of days following Go-live, but then something happening and alot of items were not being picked up in the master scheduling run. The symptoms reported by the user was that the process was only running for 10 minutes, where initially it was taking 2 hours to run. Also, no errors were being reported. I suspected a data issue and after a several hours of investigation I finally found the issue. Somehow an InventTable record with a blank ItemId had been created in the database. In the Master Scheduling code that builds the item list for each level there's an If statement that checks the ItemId and if it's blank exits the loop and because this blank item was the first item processed for the level, no items were being selected for this level for the master scheduling run.

Following on from the discovery of this issue and the workaround of deleting the blank item from InventTable, the blank item kept reappearing in the database and it was decided to modify the Master Planning code to discard items with a blank ItemId.

This was done by making a simple change to the createListsFromQueryRunmethod of the ReqTransCache_Periodic class which builds the item lists used by master planning.

   while (runQuery.next())  
   {  
     inventTable = runQuery.get(tablenum(InventTable));  
    
     // Discard any items with a blank ItemId  
     if (inventTable.ItemId == "")  
     {  
       continue;  
     }  
    
     if (!levelItemMap.exists(inventTable.bomLevel))  
     {  
       itemSet = new Set(Types::String);  
       levelItemMap.insert(inventTable.bomLevel, itemSet);  
     }  
     else  
       itemSet = levelItemMap.lookup(inventTable.bomLevel);  
    
     itemSet.add(inventTable.ItemId);  
    
   }