How can I prepare and send a report on the toolbox?

If you have suggestions or remarks on the fdident toolbox, or if you want to ask something, or if you want to ask for the correction of a bug you seem to have found, the quickest and most effective procedure is as follows.

Report on the GUI

Start the gui (fdtool), and open the Action Recorder. You can record your GUI actions with the use of it. Then, after STOP, you can save the history record into a MAT-file. This can be replayed anywhere under the fdident toolbox, if you carefully follow the guidelines below.

You want to have your actions you recorded be reproducible by the developers. This will only be successful if the GUI is started from exactly the same state. Therefore, at the beginning of each history record, we suggest to do precise GUI status setting. Please push RECORD, and do the following.

  1. "File / Clear / Whole GUI" (set standard starting status), and
  2. "UserLevel / Interactive", or "UserLevel / Automatic", or "UserLevel / Advanced", as you prefer.
Now you can record your actions. When you are ready, push STOP, then select "File / Save history as...", and give it a file name with the extension .mat .

It is also possible to automatically load your data (e.g. from a MAT-file) to the workspace before your actions. To do this, push STOP after setting the UserLevel (and before recording your actions), select in the recorder "Edit / Insert MATLAB Command", and in the field "Param" type 'load <mydata>.mat'. Now push PLAY to really execute the load command. After this, and pushing RECORD, you can record your actions.

It is also possible to insert the load command later. Write e.g. number 3 into the Index field of the recorder, push <Enter>, select in the recorder "Edit / Insert MATLAB Command", and then insert the load command into the field "Param". It will be inserted before action 3.

You can also extend the history file to send more information. If you click on "Pause" at an action, later the history file will stop running before this action. You can even type your comments into the big edit box, and the developers will see them when reproducing. After editing, do not forget to save the history file again.

You might have also introduced some superfluous actions during recording. Please delete these (Edit / Delete menu item - this acts on the current action). After getting more familiar with the recorder, you can even insert actions into a history: go to the action you want to make insertion before, push RECORD, and do your recording. Edit / Cut and Edit / Paste also work for history actions.

To be totally sure that your history can be reproduced elsewhere, please

Please write an email to fdident@vub.ac.be with a short decription of the problem, and also give the results of the following commands (exact reproduction may depend on using the same toolbox and Matlab versions, moreover, common error sources can often be localized by these informations): 
version
computer
fdident version
fdident license
which elis -all
elis date

Attach the history file prepared as above, attach also the MAT-file with the data (if you have some), and send the email.

Report on the command-line toolbox

Making a report on the command-line toolbox is maybe even easier. Please write a short M-file which reproduces the problem or question. Please write an email to fdident@vub.ac.be with a short decription of the problem, and also give the results of the following commands (exact reproduction may depend on using the same toolbox and Matlab versions, moreover, common error sources can often be localized by these informations): 
version
computer
fdident version
fdident license
which elis -all
elis date

Attach the M-file, and also the MAT-file with the data (if you have some), and send the email.

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