problems with bat-file

Hi,

I have problems using an executable file in my experiment.

I designed a study which consists of 4 different parts. in the first task, 6 colors have to be chosen out of 20. I used a custom-item based on html.
Later in the 4th part of the experiment I want directRT to display 6 stimuli. These stimuli contain information of the first part of the experiment.

Therefore it was necessary to write a java file to readout the data-file (csv) of part 1 and creates a .txt-file containing the information which images direct rt will display in the fourth part of the experiment. Of course this java file has to be activated. I therefore used a bat-file.

could it be that ML writes the csv-files AFTER having finished the WHOLE experiment? This would explain why it never works properly.
Maybe bat-files are not supported generally?

..and how to solve the problem? is there another way to record information of the first part and use this information in the last part?

If anyone has some ideas that would be great!
Thanks a lot

Moritz

Yes, MediaLab does write the data from the sessions when they are complete. However, you can capture responses and user them as you like through the Advanced Features (see user's guide) with a [I]responses.xls[/I] file. You can even capture variables taken through custom items like the one you prepared to collect 6 of 20 preferred colours. Take a look at the section (and samples) on Advanced Features from the user's guide and let me know if you would like to discuss it further or if you have any questions.

First of all, thank you for your answer.

I know that within ML we can capture responses.

What we want to do in the last part of our experiment is to present recorded data (6 variable names) using DIRECT RT. We want to present images. E.g.:If in the first part of the experiment (the custom ML file) the colours a,b,c,x,y,z were selected we later on want direct rt to present 6 images containing the information a,b,c,x,y,z.

As far as I know direct RT needs a txt-file containing names of the stimuli to present. How does direct RT "gets" the information when i do not create a txt file? Is direct RT able to read a csv file? In the "stim" folder of the direct rt based experiment I put 20 different images and used a txt file to select the prior chosen colors.

Can I really do that using the response.xls-advanced feature? ..and, how?

..For the moment our solution is to skip the experiment after part 3, open the bat-file and start then part 4 manually. That works, too, but isn't very nice. I would very much appreciate any kind of solution or ideas!

Thanks a lot and best regards,

moritz

Ahh, I see what you are saying. It would be nice if the responses.xls file could execute a macro that would produce the stim file you want. But I'm not sure that you can execute macros from within the xls file while it's running under MediaLab. The alternative would be to have a exe file that accesses and reads the values within the open responses.xls file during the session. There could be a permissions issue there (because the file is already open, it may be read only which could be ok, or access may not be available). That's beyond the scope of MediaLab though and is more of an Excel issue. Ideally, MediaLab would create a real time log of responses that could be accessed at any time during the session--e.g., opening and appending to a text file and then closing it so it could be accessed by other programs. Or to a database that MediaLab and other programs could access at the same time.