[SasView Users] News and a New Release (5.0.4)

Mon Apr 12 12:26:07 EDT 2021

Dear Members of the SasView User List,

We hope you are safe and well during these unusual times.

GENERAL NEWS
It is seven months since our last bulletin and in that time the Development Team has been working hard to bring SasView 5 to feature-parity with SasView 4. We are still not quite there, but some very good progress has been made as our latest release (see below) hopefully demonstrates.

In the intervening months we have also held two virtual 'Hackathons'. The first, in October, saw the Development Team focus on writing a paper about SasView; something that has been on our to-do list for quite some time and which many of you have asked for ('Is there a reference for SasView?')! We now have a first draft, but it still needs some more work before we can send it off for publication. The second Hackathon, in January, focussed on usability issues in SasView and we believe that the new release has benefitted as a result.

We also thought we would highlight what we see as a great contribution by some of YOU, the SasView user base. Since we released SasView 5 in May 2019, an astounding 24 new models have been added to the Model Marketplace. If you cannot find a model you need in the distributed model library, do remember to check the Marketplace.

NEW RELEASE
The Development Team is pleased to announce the release of SasView 5.0.4, available for download as usual through the website at www.sasview.org<http://www.sasview.org>.

This release fixes several issues:

- A bug that had been around since 4.2.2 and which prevented Batch Fitting from using any dI values in the data file has finally been fixed. The consequence of this bug was that Single Fits and Batch Fits on the same datasets could return different parameters. Now, where present, dI values will always be used by default in both cases.

- The bug introduced in 5.0.3 which prevented the plotting of Batch Fit results has also been fixed.

- An issue with the behaviour of the 1D pinhole resolution smearing routine in cases of large divergence has also been addressed.

- There are a number of improvements to plotting and plot management.

- Several usability issues in the P(r) Inversion and Invariant Analysis perspectives have been addressed. Improvements have also been made to the functioning of Project Save/Load.

There are also some new features in SasView 5.0.4:

- Though not strictly a new feature, the functionality and operation of parameter constraints has been significantly overhauled for this version. This was the excellent work of ILL intern, Nicholas Martinez, to whom we offer our grateful thanks. Nicolas has since moved on to a new position.

- The slicer functionality has been significantly overhauled and made to work properly.

- The slider bars on plots for selecting the q-range for fitting that featured in earlier versions of SasView have been re-introduced by popular request, although they do not yet work on linearized plots.

- It is now possible to swap the dataset used to create an existing FitPage for a different dataset. This removes the need to re-generate a complex model (eg, featuring many parameters and/or constraints) many times over to use it to fit several datasets.

- It is now also possible to assign custom names to loaded datasets, rather than just identifying the data by its filename. Right-click on a dataset in the Data Explorer to activate.

Of course, as always, there remain many things that could be added, improved or, sadly, that need fixing. So please continue to provide feedback, bug reports (issues), and, when possible, fixes, either to the code or the documentation or tutorials, as GitHub pull requests, for those who can, or by simply emailing help at sasview.org<mailto:help at sasview.org>.

FUTURE PLANS
As we said last Autumn, it is our intention, as and when the pandemic allows, to engage the community more fully in the development process writ large, including the creation of tutorials, YouTube videos, documentation, and instructional materials, as well as code development.  If any of you have thoughts on how to achieve these goals, or are simply interested in contributing in any capacity but aren't sure how, please feel free to email us on the help list.

Thank you for your continued support!

The SasView Development Team

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