Bugs and Limitations

We feel it can be just as important to explain when you shouldn't use the software as when you should. CST was designed to support the administrative task of tracking the dates on which clinical subjects have finished steps of different activities. You can also add short notes of explanation which can help you remember reasons for delay or complication in whatever activity you're using. The application produces progress reports and keeps track of who makes changes to records. That's about it! It is not intended to be a turn-key system that tracks specific paperwork you're dealing with. It will not

let you track how many CDs you're burning to back up
record the file size of files you receive.
Manage contact information of people other than what you specify for the application "Help" facility
keep track of prices for shipment costs

We expect that if this information is important, you will maintain it through some other means. We could have designed CST so it could support these tasks. However, adding more features adds more complexity and higher maintenance costs to the software. It also makes the application less generic which may limit the ability for multiple projects to share the same code.

Limitations

Avoid using large amounts of data when you use CST in demonstration mode

CST supports two operation modes: demonstration and production. You will use the demonstration mode whenever you click on run_demo.bat. When you click on run_logging_tool.bat or run_administration_tool.bat you will be using the production mode.

The main difference between these two modes is that in production mode the tools manage data in a MySQL database and in demonstration mode, CST uses a fake database. When you save work in production mode, your changes will appear the next time you use the application. In demonstration mode, you will lose all your data when you exit the application.

In demonstration mode, CST creates holds all its data in memory rather than storing it on disk. Demonstration versions of the tool are intended to promote rapid prototyping and testing efforts. They were not designed to hold large amounts of data. Therefore, when you are just trying to test whether you've addressed all your requirements, use a small representative data set to showcase your clinical study.

For developers, the demonstration version of the data repository performs poorly with large data sets because the complex data structures which hold the information for each record are frequently cloned. You can find out more about how this works here.

Bugs

Although we have thoroughly tested CST, we expect that this section will grow as other people discover bugs.

Currently there is one bug we know. For developers, please be aware that the automated test case testImportDataN in class TestCaseTrialActivityModel fails when you run the test suite CSTTestSuite against the demonstration version of the the data repository. To replicate the error, set CSTTestSuite.USE_DEMO = true and run the test suite using JUnit.

This error only effects the demonstration version of services and is probably makes a negligible difference to rapid prototyping efforts. The error will be fixed in future releases.

Author: Kevin Garwood