title: How can I model this Jagged data?
body: <p>I am in charge of modeling a 3 floor warehouse, where boxes of documents will be stored.  There are rows, columns and shelves in the equation. </p>
  
  <p>in addition:</p>
  
  <p>some floor/row/column/shelf combinations store 2 boxes, some 3.</p>
  
  <p>some rows don't have the normal amount of columns.</p>
  
  <p>They want my application to auto-increment to print labels (20 at a time) telling where the boxes go as a user scans them in.
  So box 1 is scanned would print f1r1c1s1b1
  box 2 would print f1r1c1s1b2
  ...
  f3r26c26b3</p>
  
  <p>I was thinking of building a MSSql database, filling it with all the possible combos and subtracting out the exception data. (using vb.net2005 for loops to do the filling)
  then based on the smalldatetime or perhaps a timestamp column on the table, just grab the next one that doesn't have spotFilled column set.</p>
  
  <p><b>would this work? is there a better way?</b></p>
  
  <p>(the next step is blocking off the 20 at a time so 2 users could scan boxes without bumping into each other on the same floor/row/column, Most floor/row/column/shelf combos store 21 boxes, 1 bump would probably be ok. also they would like the boxes roughly in the same order received)</p>
  
  <p>MSSQL server and VS2005 are already present in my work environment so those are the tools I am most familiar with.</p>