Help and Documentation

The DASH toolbox includes comprehensive documentation for every class and command. There are several ways to access this documentation.

Console Help Text

You can display help text for components of the DASH toolbox using Matlab’s built-in help command. To print the help text, enter help, followed by the name of the DASH component, in the console. For example:

help kalmanFilter

will display the help text for the kalmanFilter class.

To display help text for a specific function or method, use the full dot-indexing title of the method. For example, to display help for the run method of the kalmanFilter class, use:

help kalmanFilter.run

Reference Guide

The DASH documentation also includes an HTML reference guide for every class and command in the toolbox. This reference guide is essentially an offline website - the reference guide will open in an internet browser, but does not require an internet connection to use. The reference guide is more comprehensive than the console help text, and it includes additional information such as usage examples, experiment demos, and tutorials.

There are several ways to access the reference guide. The first is using the dash.doc command. Entering:

dash.doc

in the Matlab console will open the reference guide at its first page. Alternatively, you can open the documentation page for a particular class or method by using the class or method name as the first input. For example:

dash.doc('kalmanFilter')

will open the documentation page for the kalmanFilter class, and:

dash.doc('kalmanFilter.run')

will open the documentation page for the run method.

Alternatively, you can open specific documentation pages by clicking on the “Documentation Page” hyperlink at the end of console help text.

A note on syntax

Most of the commands in the DASH toolbox are class methods that act on individual objects. For example, we previously discussed how we could call the run method on different kalmanFilter objects to run the algorithm for different experimental parameters. In the documentation of these commands, you will often see the syntax obj.<method name>, where <method name> is the name of the command. This indicates that you should call the command using dot-indexing from individual objects.

For example, in the documentation kalmanFilter.run, the command syntax is listed as:

output = obj.run

The obj prefix indicates that you should call the run command on individual kalmanFilter objects. For example:

objectA = kalmanFilter('Experiment A');
outputA = objectA.run

or similarly:

objectB = kalmanFilter('Experiment B');
outputB = objectB.run

Error Messages

DASH validates user inputs before running any commands. When these inputs are not valid, DASH will produce an error message. These error messages are written with the user in mind. They typically consist of one to two blocks of error text, and they often refer to the invalid input by name. You can use the reference guide to see the names of the inputs for various commands.