Bug List for ChaRT

Browser Compatibility

There are known problems when running ChaRT with monochromatic energy inputs from Safari, Mozilla Firefox version 1.5x and other Mozilla browsers. The workaround listed below is applicable to both issues.

Safari: there is no text field for entering monochromatic energies, only a "Choose File" button. This is due to how Safari displays the ChaRT interface.

Firefox and other Mozilla browsers: there is a field for monochromatic energy, but this error page is displayed when it is used:

* Theta: 0.0
* Phi: 0.0
* Energies: You must specify one or more energies.
* Density of rays to generate: 1.0


Errors were detected and you will not be allowed to proceed until
they've been corrected. Please `Go Back' and fix the problems. Thank
you. 

The problem is that that "energy" field takes either a spectrum file or an energy string. With the 1.5x series, Firefox tries to validate the string entered into this box and sends "" (empty string) if that file does not exist. So when users are using the simple energy text input, Firefox sends the value as an empty string.

Workaround:

The form works correctly with other browsers, such as Netscape. It is recommended that users run ChaRT from another browser if possible.

If an alternate browser is not available, create a file with the same name as the energy that you want to input to ChaRT:

unix% echo >! $HOME/1.25

or

unix% touch $HOME/1.25

or

unix% touch $HOME/1.25\ 1.0\ 0.5

for multiple energies.

The file can be empty; it just has to exist. Then select this file as input for the "Monochromatic Energies [keV] or Spectrum:" field. ChaRT strips off the path information and just uses the filename for the value.

The ChaRT code will be corrected in the future to avoid this issue.

Bugs

• Users may have problems when uploading a spectrum file from a Windows machine. There are operating system incompatibilities with directory paths (use of "\" vs "/") and newline characters.

• The online help available for the ChaRT input form contains an error in the description of the input spectrum file. It states that you can use Sherpa's write source command to create your spectrum. As of CIAO 3.0, however, this produces a spectrum with flux in units of photons/cm²/s/keV, instead of the required units of photons/cm²/sec.

  Workaround: users should follow the instructions given in the Preparing to Run ChaRT thread, which explain how to use the chart_spectrum.sl script to produce a spectrum with the correct units.

• The input spectrum file for ChaRT must not have extra carriage returns in it. This is only a problem for spectrum files that have been edited by hand; most users will not encounter this.