Subject - Clips IDE (Facts Browser Window issue)

[Nazeef Abdullah]

I have a issue in CLIPS IDE, from last few days I am unable to load the Facts Browser as IDE is getting auto closed whenever I try to open the facts window the agenda window is working fine though. Can anyone help? 

[CLIPS Support]

Which platform IDE (Windows, MacOS, or Java)? Does it happen when you first open the browser after launching the IDE or does it only happen when a program is loaded?

[Nazeef Abdullah]

I am using the windows version, its happening at anytime, like I have tried after loading the program and it is getting closed, then I tried to first open the agenda and facts browser(s) and then loaded the program the behavior is same. It works sporadically and that is only when we reload the IDE project from our solution.

[CLIPS Support]

So you are running the IDE from Visual Studio rather than running one of the executables that are available on SourceForge?

[Nazeef Abdullah]

Yes I am running it from Visual Studio.

[CLIPS Support]

Have you tried seeing if the sourceforge executables work? Have you modified the project in Visual Studio in any way?

[Nazeef Abdullah]

Unable to use the executables as I have some user function written in ASP.NET, is there any way to make these user functions part of the program when run the IDE solely. Second, there wasn't any particular changes made in IDE project.

[CLIPS Support]

I understand that there are reasons why you would need to run the IDE from Visual Studio, which is why I didn't ask you why you needed to run the IDE from Visual Studio. I asked if the executables available on SourceForge exhibited the same behavior. There have been over 6000 downloads of the installer for the 6.4.1 IDE and yours is the first report of this behavior. I can't reproduce the behavior you're describing running the IDE from Visual Studio. So the first question to resolve is whether there's something unique about your environment that's causing the issue. If the SourceForge executables exhibit the same behavior with the Fact Browser, that would indicate that the problem resides with IDE code that behaves incorrectly with certain configurations of Windows or versions of the .NET libraries.

If the SourceForge executables don't exhibit the same behavior, then you need to determine if there's something different about your Visual Studio configuration. I'm able to run the IDE VS projects in Visual Studio 2022 without having to make changes to them, so that would be the next thing to check. The only way to add user functions to the IDE is by being able to recompile the executable, so if you also want the Fact Browser working you should determine the source of the Fact Browser issue first before attempting to add your user functions. Without a specific set of steps and conditions for reproducing a bug, there's not much that can be done to determine the cause of it.

[Nazeef Abdullah]

Just a question, is there any cap on loading and running the number of facts in IDE or we can load as many as we required without any cap value?

[CLIPS Support]

There's no explicit cap other than practicality. The maximum fact-index is a long long, so even if you were asserting a million facts per second you'd run out of memory instantaneously compared to the time to reach the maximum fact-index. Without any rules loaded in the IDE, I'm able to assert a million facts in less than 2 seconds on my computer, but opening the fact browser takes around 7 or 8 seconds, so there are definite limitations in how easy it is to debug a program within the IDE with that many facts even though it would be at least as difficult debugging using a console version of CLIPS.