Discussion Forum

hi jean,
sorry, i think the api is poorly documented (and probably full of bugs). i'm waiting for comsol developers to improve this nice application, i will get my hands dirty maybe with 4.2...
greetings
john

HI John,
Thanks for your word of support

2 comments of it

AS it was pointed to me recently by another member of this forum,
it is highly probable that the api are the heart of comsol itself, the gui being just comsol proprietary "packaging" of these api.. so whatever bugs in there are also bugs in comsol

Documentation, I think that this forum is an ongoing testimony [ how many thread on this? ] on the fact that Comsol forte is NOT its documentation, specially for the advanced user [ if you want to know how to move a cursor in a gui this is a different story tough...]

The api are then not different fin that regard. and this should MAYBE improve other time and version.
It is also probable that there are some undocummented API that comsol keep for itself, software company usually does that so I guess comsol did it, but I have no evidence of that as well.

future will tell

In the meantime if there was a few other users around it could make life less miserable...lol

JF

Hi

On my side it's not really the documentation that is holding me back, but really the time, for the moment in V4 I can do so much, that I have not even used Matlab with V4 (until I recently noticed that the matlab link has been broken on my PC probably due to one of the patches or numerous updates that arrive).

But I agree using the api is probably better (and allow to go deeper) than matlab and for certain advanced application it's certainly better, but I do not have enough nights to learn that, these days ;)

Hopefully the doc will get a new improvement push for V4.1, the V4 "revolution" was quite tough I beleive for the programmers, also for us users, but personally I'm very pleased with this new approach that I find cleaner and easier to assimilate w.r.t my physics training. So I'm looking forward tosee what will be showed soon, at the Paris encounter

--
Good luck
Ivar

Hi Ivar,

luckily [ or not] I just embarked on a new paid project that will require non standard scripting... so I did not really had a choice.
I am still doing non producing work with 4.0 but spent some time to get acquainted to...
I will tend to agree with you that the new approach seems better and hold a lot of promise.

One think I am waiting to have more data on tough is the s\speed... It have already been noted by others on this forum but my very VERY preliminary"feeling" confirm this feeling, that using the api slow things considerably.

I did some test where same simple case are run through the gui and through matlab [ but matlab does nothing , just launching the run and receiving some results and it seems that the matlab case run MUCH MUCH slower than the gui case , this said for casethat are exactly the same except for the front end [ gui vs matlab] ... this worry me a little but I will wait to get more data/facts/understanding to truly form an opinion on the subject...

EDIT The speed things is really comparing apple with apple for I put tic and toc to see speed of each step of a study...building geometry, meshing running the study..exporting files..and so forth.

but I must emphasis that this time comparaison I am mentionning is for solving alone not including building geometry and mesh or any data post processing

let's hope 4.1 will surprise us (regarding the API and better documentation)
i'm getting impatient ;-o

cheers
john

and also in the GUI, once I have a simulation with lots of timesteps memory exponentially jumps from 4GB to 13GB, and then even when I empty the results still holds that much memory, and does not release it.