Is there a way to find text within Sequence?

[Mikef]

Many of the TestStand 3.0 sequences that I'm creating are fairly lengthy (200 or more steps plus subsequences) and I often need to find a step within the sequence that has a specific string in the Step Name.

I'm aware of the "Find" feature, but this will change screens and give me a list of all of the steps in the sequence that contain the search string.

What I want to do is to search for the string within the Sequence so that it takes me to the NEXT occurance of that string (F3 for Find Next), so that I can Edit the Step (i.e. change the Specify Module, Preconditions, or Expressions).

The only workaround that I've figured out so far is to highlight the sequence, do a "CTL-C" and paste into a word processor, then search th
at document. Once I find it, I then have to find the same line in the TestStand Sequence.

Is there an easier way?

Mike

[David Mc]

Hello Mike,

I don't know of any way within TestStand to go to the next occurence using just F3. You can however move to the next occurence by toggling between windows and selecting the next "Find" occurence: Ctrl+TAB, down arrow, ENTER.

As far as building a custom tool for this functionality, I don't know of a way to change the "selected step" in the Sequence Editor.
You could build this functionality yourself by adding an entry to the Sequence Editor's tools menu which pops up a custom dialog containing a TestStand UI SequenceView Control, which will display your sequence and allow you to change the "selected step". But that would be a lot of work!

David Mc.
NI Applications Engineer

[Scott_Richardson]

Mike -
I do understand your wanting this type of Find capability. We had considered different designs of Find feature in TestStand and one design allowed for F3 to traverse the tree view of a single step group in a sequence. There were drawbacks to this approach, so we decided on the current implementation. Since you cannot instruct the sequence editor to view specific location in its tree view, any solution that you create would require your own sequence tree view to facilitate the display and editing of the values. The SearchResults class in TestStand 3.0 was used to implement the underlying find functionality in the sequence editor.

Scott Richardson (NI)

[Mikef]

Scott and David,

I appreciate you looking at the situation.

Thanks,

Mike