Excel interface only works on Windows

[jakebeal]

Right now, the Excel interface depends on the Windows COM interface. There may be a way to make it work on Mac and/or Linux as well.

[coverney]

Would we potentially be able to get it to work on MAC if we establish a connection with Octave instead of MATLAB?

[jakebeal]

Worth investigating, though there other problems with Octave on a Mac that might make this still a problem.

[coverney]

@jakebeal, I was wondering if the "Could not open MATLAB!" MsgBox pops up when you try to use the Run Buttons with a Mac or do you receive another error message?

[jakebeal]

I get "Could not open MATLAB!"

[coverney]

Great! Thank you very much!

[coverney]

I tried to do some research on this issue, and it seems like getting VBA to connect with Octave would be even harder than getting it to connect with Matlab, and it still might only work on Windows. I will continue looking into this to see if I can find anything more promising.

[jakebeal]

This looks like it's not going to be able to change any time soon, so closing it as unable to be fixed.

[jakebeal]

I may have found a workaround for this: http://www.rondebruin.nl/mac/applescripttask.htm

[coverney]

Wow! This looks really promising.

[coverney]

I tried going through the tutorial of the workaround and setting up the MacBook. I have two problems right now:

• No Matlab on MacBook. I tried downloading Matlab using my current license, but I can only download it once. Does BBN have a license I can use? If not, I could try getting the 30-day trial.
• The Visual Basic Editor for the Mac version of Excel is really weird in that I can't view or edit any of my modules. I wonder if that is the case for you as well.

[coverney]

Here is an image of what the current Visual Basic Editor looks like:

I can't expand the window to see the actual text of the module. Everything is basically frozen.

[jakebeal]

I just opened the Excel VB editor on batch_template.xlsm with no difficulties, so I don't know what's going on for you there.

With respect to Matlab --- for now, see if you can run Octave instead. It should be equally hard or easy from Excel on Mac.

[coverney]

That is really strange. I will try to update my Excel. Also, the excel interface directly connects to Matlab, so I would need to look into finding a new way to connect VBA to Octave. I will try a few more things to get Matlab onto the MacBook.

[coverney]

Good news:

• I was able to get Matlab 2019 installed on the Macbook
• I was able to fix my Excel VB editor problem by updating Excel

Everything should be ready for some actual issue fixing now!

[coverney]

Some helpful resources: https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/matlabmacos.html#d117e885998

[coverney]

Update: it turns out that the code used to do cooperative multitasking created a VBScript and WScript.shell, which only works in Windows. I am trying to find a way to substitute everything with AppleScripts.

[jakebeal]

You may be able to do the multitasking via a non-blocking launch of the application with the shell command, e.g., with an "&" suffix

[coverney]

Cool! I will look into that

[coverney]

I was able to get the non-blocking launch working by adding > /dev/null 2>&1 & to the end of my shell command. However, when I tested it out in the excel interface, nothing else works except calling the Matlab analyses functions. Here are some of my ideas for next steps:

• the OpenXML function I use right now doesn't work in Mac OS, so I need to find another way to load XML files. Once I find out how, I was thinking of writing a function that reads from the warnings.xml file and updates the TASBESession log every so often (maybe every minute?)
• add a completed message to the TASBESession log, which we can look for to determine when the Matlab function finishes executing. (We need this because everything is running in the background without 'threads' we have control over.)
• once I can go through the entire workflow of creating a color model with a Mac, I will combine the Mac and Windows functions by calling the correct things based on the OS. The OS can be determined via

  Dim TheOS As String
  TheOS = Application.Operatingsystem

  Then it's a matter of copying things to the other analysis modules.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this plan.

[coverney]

I just realized that reading from the warnings.xml file depends on how the file gets updated. Should it be updated in the excel interface by calling the matlab function that exports the TASBE session log every minute or so? (I am assuming that calling another Matlab script will have access to the same TASBESession log as the first analysis Matlab call.)

Or, should the xml be updated within Matlab every time a new message gets added to the session, and we would need to have a TASBEConfig/parameter that tells Matlab where the xml file is stored? For the second choice, we would just read the xml file in excel every minute or so without having to call the Matlab function.

[jakebeal]

This all sounds like reasonable next steps.

With regards to the XML file, we cannot access the same Matlab session from a second call. So I think we should give an option for the XML file to be output incrementally.

[coverney]

I tried finding an alternative to reading in an XML file using VBA, but everything I tried is not supported in Mac OS. Quite a few forums I found confirmed that XML file reading wasn't supported. I was wondering if you can think of any workarounds. I was thinking that we can convert the TASBESession xml into another file format in Matlab and try to read the new file format into Excel.

[jakebeal]

We could readily make a CSV export instead

[coverney]

I was also looking into that. There isn't a particular reason why our TASBESession logs are outputted as XML files?

[jakebeal]

The particular XML is JUnit, which is being used to incorporate automatic evaluation of outputs in the SD2.

[coverney]

Then I will create another function called to_csv_excel that would be called only when the excel interface runs.

[coverney]

Update: I was able to create a method that creates a csv version of the TASBE session log. I also wrote a VBA script that can read it and do the color-coding. Currently, I am trying to figure out how to write the session log into the workbook with Mac os because the old code using the parallel threads is no longer applicable.

[coverney]

Update: I updated the Matlab csv_to_excel function to append new messages instead of re-writing the session log each time. However, I still have problems with getting the periodic TASBESession log updates in the Excel template. Here is a breakdown of the issues I am currently encountering:

1. When the application waits for a certain amount time, the entire application freezes, which is a problem we dealt with previously via cooperative multitasking. However, excel Mac can't use the same cooperative multitasking approach we used for Windows.
2. I don't know when the analysis is completed unless I keep looking for the End message in the TASBESession csv file, which means I need some sort of timer (leads back to problem 1).

Maybe we could find another way of recognizing when the analysis finishes running and then read in the session log and output figures (though I can't think of way that won't involve the Application waiting/ freezing till then). I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

[coverney]

I was able to figure out the freezing problem using another timing method. In terms of next steps, I will clean up my code for creating the color model and then apply it to the other analyses. :)

[coverney]

Update: I cleaned up the code for the colormodel and tried to get the cancel button working but running another command to abort TASBESession doesn't actually cancel the current analysis. Instead, I just display a message box that the cancel buttons don't work on macOS. I also started getting the plusminus analysis workflow working. Unfortunately, sometimes running the analysis makes Excel crash, but I am not sure how to fix it.

While testing, I realized that the TASBESession log updates can be somewhat clunky at times. I have a few ideas to alleviate this problem, but I was thinking of opening separate issues once a basic version of the analyses work in macOS.

In terms of next steps, I will get the transfer curve and batch analyses working. (For batch I still need to figure out how to make the Batch Results sheet.) Then I will transition everything back to Windows and integrate everything.

[jakebeal]

Sounds like a good plan --- please set up this merge and the new follow-on issues when ready.

[coverney]

Update: I was able to get all of the analyses running. My next steps will be to write up a guide for macOS users and add back in the Windows code.

[coverney]

Can be closed once https://github.com/TASBE/TASBEFlowAnalytics/pull/488 gets merged into develop

[jakebeal]

Fixed --- though there are some rough bits.