EViews.com

Hi,

I'm having problems with a program that I've written that randomly crashes Eviews. I wonder if it is a bug because it will operate successfully at times but not at others.

I've attached a short example set of programs,workfile (you also need to creat a database just called "database" which will also generate the same sort of crashes to hopefully illustrate the issue (and have tried lots of alternative versions of the "control program" by placing the rerun the control program lines at different places and using more and less eloquent versions of if statements).

What I want is a program that opens a dialogue box which allows the user to select from a variety of programs to run(ie execute). One of the options includes opening a table (In my actual environment this table allows the users to enter sets of forecast growth rates etc which are then used in later programs to drive forward the variables). If the user opens the table they must then run the "control program" again to continue the process.

The idea is that the user may iterate through the steps multiple numbers of times until they come up with something they are happy with. Usually if I iterate through only once or twice everything works fine. This includes when I select the cancel button to end the program. At other times when I press the cancel button Eviews crashes - even if it is something I have done successfully in the past. Basically the whole thing seems a bit unstable.

Attached are some very short and simple example programs. I recommend modifying the paths in the programs as appropriate and running the example control program. Randomly select the different options (they should all work at any one time) and press cancel at various stages to see if you experience the same program.

Of course I'm ahppy to be pointed to any suggestions around the structure of the "control program" that would prevent the possibility of the crash occurring.

I'll need to add an additional post with 2 more short programs in it.

thanks

Peter

here are the two additional programs

I just ran it many times, playing around with different options, and didn't get a crash (or notice anything weird in our debugging version of EViews). Is your copy up to date?

I think I've worked out what causes it to crash.

When you were testing it did you run the program in quite mode?

I experimented running the program on other people's computers and it didn't crash (what differed was their default was to run in verbose mode). I was running it in quiet mode and it will crash - generally I can get it to crash in about 20 secs by randomly selecting the programs to run and hitting cancel after have running the program succesfully a few times (including some previously successful cancels).

Is there a reason for this difference ie verbose = no problems, quiet= eventual crash.

cheers

Peter

Doubtful that verbose/quiet is relevant.

The program runs fine on my computer when I run it in verbose mode. If I run it on other people's computers on quiet mode it will crash eviews so it must be something about the quiet versus the verbose running.

What happens if you change the calling program so that rather than recursively calling itself, it just has a while loop?

Or, what happens if you change the exec of itself to a run?

If I change exec to run it still crashes - Haven't tried the while approach

Overall - its fine for us to run it in verbose mode, so that is the solution we'll stick to