where to submit bugs / improvements

[Wolfgang]

Hi,

I am wondering if there is a dedicated place where to suggest minor or major improvements or report supposed bugs.... In the past, I did it in this forum, but it might be a little bit boring for others? Moreover, I would always expect an answer from NI if reporting some unexpected behavior etc., while in the forum not all entries might be addressed.

In addition, it might be helpful if there would be a site where all officially acknowledged problems are listed - it might help if one encounters some 'strange' behavior and finds this already listed there - or not.

Recently I have learned from this (rather hidden) link  where to submit feature requests, and I thought of something similar... Does it exist, or would it be possible to set it up?

Of course,  I can send boring comments here, too, such as: in the Build/Target Settings/Version Info the checkmark label should read 'Preview Substitutions' instead of 'Prevew Substitutions' 🙂

Wolfgang

[Mert_A.]

Sometime issues that are raised in this forum will turn out to be bugs, and internally we'll file bug reports for those. There is not a way for customers to directly file bug reports. I would recommend that you continue to voice potential bugs in this forum, however boring they may be. NI will address your post. If you have a feature/behavior suggestion, then I'd suggest you use the Product Feedback link you already found.

As for the UI typo, it will be fixed for the next major release. 🙂 Thanks for the heads up.

Mert A.

National Instruments

[Wolfgang]

Hi Mert,

OK. But may I suggest an 'open' bug list that every CVI user can access? It might be useful to check such a list in case one observes some 'strange' behavior.

You see, a list of fixed bugs does exist, see http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/7953, but in my opnion such a list would be even more useful if available for all currently known issues.

Wolfgang

[Mert_A.]

I would recommend filing a product suggestion for that, so that it can go through our review process.

Thanks.

Mert A.

National Instruments

[dummy_decoy]

i second this suggestion: i have submitted quite some bugs in the past, not all of them have been resolved. i would like to know the state of those bugs and i have no way to do that.

[LuisG · Accepted solution]

Hello dummy,

You can always ask here about the state of any bug or suggestion. I don't know if we do it consistently, but we usually do post the bug report ID so that you can ask about it later. But even if you don't have the bug report, you can just link to the original forum discussion and we should be able to track it down.

As for the general issue of making all the current known issues available externally, that is a request that we've heard before, and we hope to eventually be able to make it happen, but it's not a trivial thing. Our current bug report database has a large number of items in it that refer to internal-only issues (i.e. problems found internally on unreleased versions of CVI), and also contains false alarms, duplicate issues, trivial problems, non-bugs (tasks), reports of bugs that haven't yet been investigated, etc, etc. It's not a trivial task to filter out the "known issues" that are relevant to our users, as well as determining exactly all the versions of the product that have the bug. For example, creating the bug-fix list that you see when a new version of CVI is released is still a fairly labor intensive process, but it's feasible because tracking fixed bugs is very different tracking outstanding issues.

Having said that, we haven't given up on the idea, and we hope to eventually be able to do something like this, since we are aware of how useful it is to customers.

Luis

NI

[cdk52]

Greetings all.

Here is something that I would find useful:

The ability to view detailed information about the fixed bugs listed here. It would be nice to be able to click on the Bug Id, and be shown:

• the environment (OS version, CVI version, specific hardware, driver info...) in which the bug is observed
• the actions which trigger the problem behaviour
• recommended workaround (if any)

For example, see Bug 66600 on the page linked above. How should I modify my code to avoid this issue in my software until such time as I upgrade?

Regards,

Colin.

[LuisG]

Hi Colin,

Yes, you raise a valid point. I would say that the current summary list is mainly intended to reach those users who did run into that issue, and can recognize it from the abbreviated description provided in the list. I realize that if you're scanning the list in order to see what problems you might run into, in most cases we're not really providing enough information.

Of course, in lieu of a better system, you're always welcome to ask someone here for more information about a particular bug. For 66600, I can give you the following information:

A valid pointer is passed as a function argument but it does not "arrive" within the function -- it's just marked as invalid. Use attached project to reproduce. Casting the pointer to void in the call solves the problem and changing the signature of the callback function to use void instead of a typed callbackData pointer also does.

 Luis

Message Edited by LuisG on 04-01-2009 02:28 PM

[cdk52]

Thanks for that information, Luis.

I agree that asking questions in the forum is a workable solution.

Regards,

Colin.

[ElectroLund]

Where are you guys submitting bugs to the devs?  I still don't see a place where we can officially do so.

Writing entries about bugs on this forum does not make for a good system to submit a bug report.