Dear Roger and DSSAT user community,

I appreciate your feedback with respect to DSSAT and your comments that
no software is perfect.

DSSAT v4.0 and DSSAT v4.5 (to be released soon) and especially the
XBuild tool for preparing experimental details file were initially
designed to develop experiments similar to what you would conduct under
field conditions. As such, an experiment that has 100+ treatments is
unrealistic. Over time people have started to expand the application of
DSSAT for both seasonal analysis, rotational analysis and spatial
analysis using hypothetical experiments. As such there was a need for
experimental details files that contained more than 100 treatments.
Unfortunately the current bottleneck is the underlying file structure
that has not changed for the past 10 years. We are planning to migrate
DSSAT to Open Source following the release of DSSAT v4.5. We expect a
much larger contribution by the DSSAT user community with respect to the
development of tools and utilities for DSSAT as well as crop model
improvement.

Current fixes for 100+ levels include the following:

- Do NOT use the XBuild tool for complex files. XBuild was developed for
experiments that have less than 100 treatments.
- For advanced users you can use an ASCII editor to build more complex
files but be careful. The current limit is 999 treatments.
- To avoid any data input mistakes I recommend that you develop multiple
FileXs each containing 99 treatments. The current DSSAT shell still has
the capability to analyze ALL your treatments once the runs have been
completed.

Again, we appreciate your continued support.

Regards,

Gerrit


On 11/08/2010 4:14 AM, Roger Rivero Jr wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> As soon as I saw this messages I was just in shock: 500 levels are a huge
> amount.
>
> So I made my research and detected the following errors in the DSSAT
> code/behavior. (DSSAT 4.5.0.2, self stated as beta version).
>
> DISCLAIMER: I am a DSSAT enthusiast, I just report this bugs to
> provide some
> support to the software developers and avoid headaches to users. Bugs are
> normal in applications. Don't you know Windows? How many times have
> you see
> the Blue Screen dumping your memory after a Fatal ERROR?
>
> DSSAT 3.5 ¿as well as DSSAT 4? was not able to work with more than 99
> levels
> of anything (though I exploited back in the 90's the round around
> aspect of
> decimal numbers in PCs by just starting over with the 00 value, but it
> obviously just worked on the number of treatments, since reference to a
> duplicate number from a given treatment would not be possible).

--

--->  New contact information<---
Gerrit Hoogenboom
Director, AgWeatherNet, and
Professor of Agrometeorology

Washington State University
24106 North Bunn Road
Prosser, Washington  99350-8694, USA
1-509-786-9371; Fax: 1-509-786-9370
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www.weather.wsu.edu