How can I run a sequence file which is stored as BLOB

[olifri]

Hallo,

I' using (or better will use) TestStand 3.1 and a ORACLE database. Is there a way to load and execute sequence files which are not stored on the filesystem but as BLOBs in the ORACLE DB. The choice which sequence has to be executed is done dynamically within a custom built process model. A certain sequencefile should be loaded and started by referencing it not by filename but with the PrimaryKey of the table.

I don't know if this would be a certain capability implemented in TestStand or in ORACLE. It could be something like mapping a BLOB into the Filesystem and pretend that the file is present on the filesystem, something like that!

Any ideas are highly appreciated

Thanks

Oliver Friedrich

[Philippe_Goetz]

Hi,

a sequence file is stored in ascii format, that you could convert to binary data and store it as blob in a database. However, for execution it must be converted back and saved on the file system. You could use the database steps to do this dynamically.

Kind regards,

Philippe Goetz,
Applications Engineer, National Instruments

[Scott_Richardson]

Oliver -
TestStand does not have any hooks to allow a test system developer to override the internal searching for a file on disk. The only simple option that I see is to to query the database and download the latest sequences ahead of time. This is similar to a Source Code Control mechanism. Keep in mind that once an execution loads a sequence file, the file is typically not released until the last execution completes so you cannot load an updated copy of the sequence file while executing, especially the client sequence file.