Queues enable you to control which of your local Output Builders will process a specific output build. More than one local builder can be assigned to a queue of work.
If your implementation does not require local builders, then queues are not required.
Consider the following examples:
- You have several product lines, and the engineering teams for those product lines are in different geographic locations. You want the CAD builds for a specific product line to be built on output builder machines that reside in the same geographic location as the engineering team that controls that product line.
- You have production CAD builds that must be completed quickly, and have dedicated a group of local builders for that purpose. However, you also have test CAD builds which must be processed, but are clearly not as urgent, and have only one local builder dedicated for that purpose.
Both of these example situations need two queues, and route the build jobs to them as appropriate.
To Add a Queue
Each company has a built in Default Queue, which you cannot remove. By default all outputs will be assigned to this queue. To create more queues, visit infrastructure > queues in the admin interface. Press on the 'Add' button at the bottom of the screen. In the new queue form that appears, set the following properties:
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
| Name | The name of your queue. |
| Description | A description of your queue, for information purposes only. |
| Max Build Time (seconds) |
Epicor CPQ queues are scalable and reliable. If an Output Builder machine crashes or fails on a build, and never reports back to the server, then the build request it was processing will be placed back into the queue for another output builder to process. The 'Max Build Time' setting controls how long the server should wait before re-adding the request back to the queue. It is important that this setting is longer than the longest build times you experience for any builds that go to this queue. If this setting is too short, the server will mistakenly think your output builder crashed, when in reality the builder is just taking longer to build than you have allowed. If this is the case, you could see your outputs being built twice on 2 different output builders. |
Routing Outputs to Queues
Once you've created your custom queue, you can tell your configurator builds to be sent to this queue for processing.
- Open the configurator with the build you want to send to this queue.
- Select the build in the configurator tree on the left.
- In the properties of the build, select the queue. Note that 'Build in Cloud' must be false for the queue selection to be available.
