NI TestStand Idea Exchange

Hi,

It would be good if TS could allow to do a variable multiassociation. By this I mean developers can aassociate output from a module to more than one variable at one go directly from the Step Settings window, from the Module tab, as below.

It looks like there is no "gentle" way to access the results of the executed tests in ongoing execution during this execution.

Sometimes there is a need to access the test results during the execution, before the data will be committed to the database, and execution is still ongoing. The reason for that could be we can reuse the some data of the test in other tests, or we can use for example the status of the test to drive the flow in our sequence.

It looks like there is no other general way to do that as only described by Sasha here: http://forums.ni.com/t5/NI-TestStand/RunState-ProcessModelClient-How-to-access-the-results-from-the/td-p/2796658

So, theoretically, - please read Sasha post - we have recipe to access all results we want. However, problem with accessing the result list is that, that it is done via the index of the ResultList array.

It leads us to two problems:

1. the elements in that list depends on the step position in the sequence file, which makes the editing sequence almost impossible,
2. if our sequence contain loops the problem from the point above is even more impossible.

Therefore, the idea:

Please prepare the easy accessible, not index based as it is now, method (container?) which developers can access the Results containers of the steps on the fly during the execution.

Handler proposal 1:
Step name (binded as unique ID) + execution order number

Handler proposal 2:
Callers path + StepName +execution order number

where execution order number could be the handler which could be number 0 by default unless the step is called few times.

Other post: https://forums.ni.com/t5/NI-TestStand/Accessing-measured-data-from-further-steps/td-p/1144710

As someone whom regularly maintains custom process models for my team, there are times when I wish to harvest data from 'any MainSequence run' without requiring my individual developers to remember to set specific custom-parameters or 'runstate.root.* or Locals.ResultList[] values within their test programs correctly every time. 

It would be great if there were hooks, beyond simple parameter passing, that could allow me to dynamically 'reach in' to active execution context of MainSequence ideally 1x at start and end of MainSequence execution (i.e. just after context fabrication, and just before context garbage collection).

In this way, I could use API to monitor data that usually gets garbage collected before the model can 'see' it.

i.e. if I see they have a local variable in their test, Locals.Debugging_Active == true, perhaps I could catch that at the framework level, and update the report header to say 'possibly not production data!',   even if developer forgot to correctly set the 'is Validation Data' flag that is formally available.

In an ideal world we would have strict process & TS style rules to enforce that all developers must set key variables as part of their executions, but also having a scrappy way to catch test-internal context issues within process model (even if this does break the paradigm of immediately garbage collecting sequence specific internal data) would be a great fall-back strategy for teams where they have 1 or 2 test experts and a much larger pool of non-expert test developers using TestStand. 

I upgraded from TestStand 2019 SP1 to TestStand 2024 Q4 and the UI looks really bad, with black and white theme with icons not recognizable and hard to look at for longer periods.

1) Please add function to have themes for TestStand like Visual Studio, some examples:
Dark theme
Classic theme (Older version of TestStand)

2) Make it easier for users to change the UI and function to zoom in/out in TestStand (like it´s possible in newer versions of LabView).

Iam thinking about expressions field should have zoom in/out function.

3) Change it back how it was for showing Sequences and Variables (TestStand).
It´s not better to show only one or the other. I would like both to be shown at the same time as it was in previous TestStand versions.

Step type: Label

Tab: Label

Field: Label Description

Most text field can zoom in, but not the Label Description.

It would a lot easier to read if one can ZOOM IN in the field.