[kepler-dev] [Bug 3735] - R actor produces 'null' message when R not found on PATH

[bugzilla-daemon at ecoinformatics.org]

http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3735


cxh at eecs.berkeley.edu changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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             Status|NEW                         |ASSIGNED




------- Comment #2 from cxh at eecs.berkeley.edu  2009-01-09 22:37 -------
I was there when Edward ran the demo and we _may_ have seen a message
about R not being installed.  Even if we did, there are two points:

1) A user dialog with just the word "null" in it is not very user friendly
and is a bug.  The message should be more explicit, even if there is a
proceeding message dialog that is well worded.

If, under Mac OS X, I don't have R in my path, I see a reasonable message
dialog and then when I hit ok, I get a error dialog that says "null"

The stack trace is:

java.lang.NullPointerException
        at org.ecoinformatics.seek.R.RExpression.postfire(RExpression.java:767)
        at ptolemy.actor.AtomicActor.iterate(AtomicActor.java:439)
        at
ptolemy.actor.sched.StaticSchedulingDirector.fire(StaticSchedulingDirector.java:188)
        at ptolemy.actor.CompositeActor.fire(CompositeActor.java:415)
        at ptolemy.actor.Manager.iterate(Manager.java:718)
        at ptolemy.actor.Manager.execute(Manager.java:349)
        at ptolemy.actor.Manager.run(Manager.java:1138)
        at ptolemy.actor.Manager$3.run(Manager.java:1179)

I fixed this bug.

However, RExpression has a bigger problem in that it pops up dialogs
directly instead of using the ptolemy.gui.MessageHandler facility.
The problem is that if RExpression probably can't be used in a non-graphical
environment (it certainly can't be compiled without swing).
There should be a bug report for this issue.  In general, actor code
that calls JOptionPane.showMessageDialog() is suspect.

2) The real bug is that the first demo should not require additional software
that the user might not have installed yet.  We are offering access to
Kepler via svn, so we should expect that new Kepler users will download
Kepler via svn and try it out without first installing R.  The solution
is to have some Non-R demos at the first and to have the R demos very
clearly marked.  As a first demo, I propose the predator/prey demo, it is
easily understood.
So, there should be a bug report for this as well.

Sorry about the confusion on this.

I'll close this after I create new bugs to address the above issue