Optaplanner: planning variable that is also a shadow variable?

Question

i want a change on one planning variable on one planning entity to affect the same variable on certain other instances of the same planning enitity. in my case, I have a planning entity called taskResourceAllocation that has a planning variable called taskStartIndex, and i want a change to the taskStartIndex on one taskResourceAllocation to be reflected on the other taskResourceAllocations that belong to the same task, and to all the taskResourceAllocations that belong to other tasks of the same activity.

Can i annotate the taskStartIndex with both a @planningVariable and a @CustomShadowVariable ?

i saw the exam example in the sources which uses casting from exam to leading exam and following exam and shadows the change of period from the leading exam to the following exams and thought about going with that approach but i'm not sure that it suits me, as i am afraid of duplicating entities...

Answer 1

Sounds like you want a genuine planning variable on Task (which is then a planning entity too, don't forget it in your solver config) and then have a shadow variable on every taskResourceAllocation of that task. I doubt if that even needs to be a shadow variable, you might just be able to do getTask().getStartIndex().

But a genuine planning variable cannot be a shadow variable at the same time.