COM Automation Client Support bugs

[CharlieEVIEWS]

Dear all,

Ive been using the COM Automation tools a lot lately (EV8 and EV9) and they are just absolutely outstanding. So immensely useful. I have a few comments however, which might help them to be streamlined...

1.) The R configuration was quite tricky - I tried with both an existing and then fresh install of R. This may be even more problematic at present as I believe RandFriends has been discontinued (the last known version which is compatible I think is RAndFriendsSetup2151V3.2-7-1).

2.) Regarding xopen(type=m), about half the time, the matlab interface (command window) doesnt load correctly, resulting in error messages. This comes in two forms: a UI error message popup in EViews, and a message in the x-log: ??? MATLAB Execute failed (no error message).

Finally, the one I would like some advice on most if at all possible, is the fact that:

3.) When I send/receive large matrices (using either xput to send, or sometimes xget to receive) to/from MATLAB (~8mb, approximately 2000x2000 to 4 s.f.), the interface times out/crashes. Is there any possible remedy at my end I can use to overcome this?

Best wishes - and again, please allow me to emphasize how useful this feature of EViews is to enable cross platform statistical programming.

Charlie

[EViews Steve]

Hi Charlie:

Thanks for your encouragement and your suggestions!

Yes, we need to update our instructions on how to get R COM Automation up and working, but honestly this changes so often it's hard to keep up-to-date on this. I'll see about writing some new instructions into the next patch or so.

I'm not sure why MATLAB is causing intermittent issues. Are you running EViews 64-bit? This would rule out any memory limitation issues as 32-bit EViews takes up all the available memory address space, even if you don't have a large workfile open. And by the way, you can have both 64-bit and 32-bit installed on the same machine using the same license.

As for your timeouts, try using our COMTIMEOUT command before you call XOPEN. If you set COMTIMEOUT to 0, this will turn off the normal timeouts and make EViews wait forever. Here's a link to the page that discusses this:
http://forums.eviews.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=9259

Another tip: You can also change the version of MATLAB that is opened by EViews by changing the ProgID that EViews uses (goto Options->General Options->External Program Interface). If you use a different ProgID, you can see more of MATLAB as it's trying to run which might provide more details as to why a particular command is failing. Here's a link to the various MATLAB progids you can use (look under the "Programmatic Identifies" section):
http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ma ... vd4-1.html

Steve

[EViews Steve]

I just did some testing with the latest version of statconnDCOM and wrote some new instructions on how to get it setup correctly. If you have time, take a quick look and see if it matches your own installation experience.

http://forums.eviews.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=12021

Steve

[nupogodi]

COM automation is great indeed, but it would be even more useful if one could use .NET directly from Eviews as is possible in case of Matlab:

http://se.mathworks.com/help/matlab/mat ... rview.html

Do you have any plans to extend Eviews this way?

[EViews Steve]

That's an interesting concept. I haven't heard of this before, but I'll look into it. Are there many of you that would find this useful?