SasView 4.0 Alpha 2

New with 4.0

The main purpose of this major version release is a significant restructuring of the way models work to address one of the biggest issues identified by the community: the difficulty of adding complex custom models. With this release all models are essentially treated the same within the computational framework. The "built-in" models have been separated out into an independent sasmodels package. Custom models continue to be discovered by placing them in the user plugin directory. All models consist of 1 or optionally 2 files: a model.py file containing much of the details (name, parameters, etc) and either the methods for computing intensity or links to an optional model.c which contains the computational code. All models, whether from sasmodels package or in the plugins directory are treated the same by the SasView application.

Other things of note in this release:

• Support for openCL means that running on macs will automatically use GPUs or multiple CPU if they exist. This is true for most windows machines as well, but in some cases the user will need to download and install the openCL drivers for their computer.
• All model documentation has been reviewed and updated
• A number of other minor bugs and improvement

Current Known Issues (a living list)

please support the project by reporting any issues not on this list

• Sum/multiply model throws an error and does not work
• Help button on optimizer choice panel is not functioning (all other help seems to be working)
• Magnetic contrast has not yet been ported from 3.1.2
• "layer" models have not yet been ported from 3.1.2. These are models such as the Beaucage model and RPA which allow the user to define the number of levels of the model to use.
• Source code for the "built-in" models is not included in the install. Currently altering an existing model requires going to github to download the source then dumping those 2 files (1 if a pure Python model) into your local plugin folder. The model can then be edited and should be immediately available.
• crashes if old style custom models are in plugin folder
• resolution function option does not work. If attempt is made to change it SasView freezes and must be restarted
• stopping the fit while it is running using the DREAM optimizer will cause SasView to crash next time a fit is started.
• Dream optimizer does not work in batch fitting mode
• Linearized fits produce incrorrect qmin,qmax, qRgmax and bogus uncertainties