[SasView Users] SasView News and a New Release (5.0.5)

[Stephen King - STFC UKRI via users]

Dear Members of the SasView User List,

We hope this email finds you safe and well and once again pushing back the frontiers of your science as the restrictions of the pandemic continue to ease.

GENERAL NEWS
It is almost 6 months since we solicited your help in helping to test the first release candidate (rc1) of SasView 5.0.5, and we are now delighted to say that we have finally released it (see below for further details)! The testing threw up an assortment of issues that, with our limited resources, inevitably took time to rectify, but we have learnt some valuable lessons in the process.

Version 5.0.5 is still just short of achieving feature-parity with SasView 4.x, but we are now very close and can see the end of the road. So we would like to take this opportunity to encourage and remind any of you still using SasView 4.x to start actively making the transition to SasView 5.x. There is no active development of SasView 4.x, there has not been any for several years, and nor do we now envisage any in the future.

That said, moving to SasView 5.x will have consequences for some of you, particularly those of you using Mac's. In some instances the only way you will be able to run SasView 5.x will be to update your Mac OS or update your Mac. Unfortunately, the need for this is something that is simply beyond our control.

There is some good news for those of you that wish to use SasView on Linux. We recently learnt that Maksim Rakitin at the NSLS-II had been producing 64-bit conda packages of SasView for Linux and OSX. If these are of interest, please visit https://github.com/SasView/sasview/wiki/Conda-installation. And we remind you that for some years now, Stuart Prescott & Drew Parson have been maintaining a Debian implementation of SasView. You can find links to this on our Wiki at https://github.com/SasView/sasview/wiki/DevNotes_Projects_Debian.

The time spent finalising this new release has naturally impacted progress elsewhere in the collaboration, and so things like the paper on SasView are still not finished. However, there are also some positive developments to report:

-          We are very pleased to welcome a new developer to the collaboration. Lucas Wilkins is based in the new Research Software Engineering Team at ISIS and will spend up to 80% of his time working on SasView.


-          Annika Stellhorn at Lund University has put together an in-person Workshop<https://www.linxs.se/events/2022/6/13/linxs-workshop-magnetic-sans-data-analysis-and-software-prospects> in Lund later this month to explore what additional developments in SasView would be beneficial for the Magnetic-SANS community. This kind of community-led endeavour is something the Development Team is very pleased to see and encourage.


-          And the Magnetic-SANS Workshop will be followed by a 3-day 'new contributor event<https://indico.esss.lu.se/event/3009/>' for those who want to learn more about the structure of the SasView codebase and how to pursue their own developments.


-          We have also added a couple of new videos to our YouTube channel<https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxvD3ysXJ05l6MgY7YKjEFQ> in the past year. Why not take a look!

NEW RELEASE
The Development Team is pleased to announce the release of SasView 5.0.5, available for download as usual through the website at www.sasview.org<http://www.sasview.org>.

This release fixes several issues:


  *   The long standing issue with the Levenberg-Marquardt optimiser not respecting parameter bounds has been resolved by the move to a later version of the Bumps package.



  *   A bug which prevented the radius_effective parameter from being updated in P(Q)*S(Q) models when the data were resolution smeared has been fixed.



  *   A bug that prevented the formation of composite mixture models with multiplicity (for example, models such as core_multi_shell * hardsphere + cylinder or core_multi_shell @ hardsphere + cylinder) has been fixed.



  *   The button to reset the selected Q-limits for fitting now works again!



  *   There has been a technical change to the point in the calculation at which the volume normalisation of P(Q)*S(Q) models is applied by the move to a later version of the Sasmodels package. This change was actually incorporated into v5.0.4 but due to an oversight was omitted from the release notes at the time, although a note was added to the web version after the release. In most instances this change will go un-noticed unless you happen to be plotting the individual contributions of P(Q) or S(Q) and comparing them with similar calculations performed in versions of SasView before v5.0.4, at which point the scaling of the functions will be seen to be different.



There are also some new features in this version. Most notably:



  *   The Generic Scattering Calculator Tool has been overhauled and its capabilities significantly expanded. In particular, it will now perform magnetic/polarised SANS computations. As part of this upgrade, coordinate data in some VTK formats are now also supported.



  *   The data loaders have also been improved. SasView will now read CanSAS1D XML data files with multiple <SASdata> blocks in a single <SASentry>. And, by popular demand, 1D data can now be saved in CSV format. SESANS data files with the extension .sesans are now also recognised.



  *   A Boucher-type interfacial profile function has been added to the spherical_sld model.



New Models

The following models have been added to the Model Marketplace<http://marketplace.sasview.org/> since v5.0.4 was released:



  *   Magnetic Whirl
  *   Maier-Saupe distribution
  *   Cyclic Gaussian distribution
  *   Superball Model - Neither Sphere nor Cube
  *   OrientedMagneticChains



Known Issues

The 'rpa' (Random Phase Approximation, for polymer scattering) model has been temporarily withdrawn. Some gremlins had crept into how the model parameters interacted with the Fit Page which meant you were not performing the calculation you thought you were. This is being investigated. Should you need it, a separate binary blend model (the most performed calculation) is available from the Model Marketplace<http://marketplace.sasview.org/> .

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
It is likely that some of the Development Team will be present at SAS 2022 this September. If you are also heading there, please do take the opportunity to look us up and say 'Hello'!

Thank you for your continued support!

The SasView Development Team


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