Add "Project Globals" and/or "Workspace Globals"

[crelf]

I've found that there's a hole in the global map in TestStand - often there's something that I want to access across a project or workspace instance, but not a station (this is especially true when developing on my laptop).  I know that there are work arounds for this issue, but none of them are elegant solutions IMHO.  I'd like to see workspace and/or project globals implemented.

[Elaine_R.]

adding a new note to this as another work around now that an age has passed.

I've gotten in the habit for my station globals of just API scripting them at the top of my custom process model/configuration entry point so that I never have to check them anymore...

i.e. if station global isn't found, go make it, and leverage some default value that I can prompt for/infer from other files/provide a good default for.  Since I don't use many, and of the ones I use 90% of my station globals are paths/ counters for station events... related I can usually determine what they should be with minimal user interference.

this means that I now deploy with 0 station globals (which stops me from deploying the wrong ones) and on first-run on a new machine, they are either built silently, or I am prompted to provide correct values which are then saved for the remainder...  Less fuss, less muss 🙂 

My deployment machine can still see all variables for all projects, which sometimes causes some user-error on my part... but at worst I delete them all and get a fresh start...

but it does require some API know how...

-Elaine R.

[crelf]

Nice workaround Elaine - and it works great when deploying. Unfortuntely it's not as clean when in development, but that's another story - there's still a need for project variables, but your workaround makes not having them a little more bearable in the short term.

[JesseG]

Update:

More information on the specific feature that was introduced to give this functionality.

In 2016, we released a feature called environment files which allows for multiple sets of station settings including sets of station globals. See this kb article here for more information:

https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA03q000000x3d9CAA&l=en-US