| Author | Message | ||
     Chris Bailey (cbailey) Junior Member Username: cbailey Post Number: 3 Registered: 08-2006 |
When calling sessions of FlexPDE from another software application (to perform an automated parametric search for the "nicest" design), I pass this command to the OS (WinXP Pro V5.1 sp2): c:\FlexPDE5\FlexPDE519.exe -S C:\designtrial.pde I keep multiple versions of FPDE available, hence the name. My other application (SAS, a stats package from SAS Institute) writes FPDE definitions into an #include file, calls FPDE, waits for FPDE to finish (usually a couple minutes), reads files Exported from FPDE, collects and saves all the progress so far, and then repeats all this. SAS's job here is small, it's almost all FPDE, though SAS can be smart about what definitions to try next based on the history. I use SAS this way with other apps and have high confidence the SAS side of things is behaving. If the resulting session of FPDE hits an error (memory protection fault, bad node, tangled mesh), FPDE stops to display an error dialog and does not return control to the OS, limiting the number of designs I can run without periodically checking. I wish it would just exit, rather than stopping and displaying an error dialog. I hoped the -S command line switch would do that, but it doesn't seem to. I have tried simply waiting for FPDE to return control to the OS. I have also tried watching for either the Exported file to appear or ten minutes to elapse since starting FPDE, and then issuing the command taskkill /t /im FlexPDE519.exe to the OS so that if the problem is an error dialog, that particular design just gets stepped over and we start FPDE fresh with a new design. The /t switch should take care of any child processes too. This method sometimes ends the hangup, but not always. Sometimes it still hangs with a FPDE dialog like "no common cell" or "too many neighbors" showing, and Task Manager still listing a process called "FlexPDE519.exe" (the name appears to match character for character). Reissuing the above command still doesn't kill that process, nor does issuing it from the Start > Run dialog, though selecting the process in Task Manager and clicking End Process does work (but that can't be done programmatically). I typically get 20 or 100 or so designs evaluated before an error halts progress, though there's time enough every night to evaluate 500 designs. I've only gotten errors during these long automated sessions, never with sessions of FPDE I run the normal, interactive way, so it's not easy to track down these occasional problems and prevent dialogs in the first place. It's bad enough that I must use Windows. Additionally having to spend every night sleeplessly watching for error dialogs would be intolerably unjust. Question: Is there a way to start FPDE from the command line so that errors make it exit & return control to the OS without displaying a dialog, or some other fix? By the way, it is so difficult to get most other FEM analysis tools to do this that FPDE is the only practical choice I know! They're too heavily committed to superficial mousing around for every interaction. Thanks! - Chris | ||
| Robert G. Nelson (rgnelson) Moderator Username: rgnelson Post Number: 1003 Registered: 06-2003 |
This is simply incomplete implementation on our part. We need to hunt down all the error reports and bypass them in "Silent" mode. We will try to do this for the next maintenance release. |