Hello,
I've started working on a project where I'm maintaining a piece of older code written by a since-departed employee of my company. It's a TestStand 3.0 sequence file calling on Labview 7.0 code. The thing is, there were two of these installations done at different times and, somewhere in the woods between stations 1 & 2, the code base diverged. Part of it was due to not being able to get exact duplicate hardware for the PXI chassis and part was, apparently, due to the fact the client used the 2 machines to test different UUT models.
So, I'm looking at copies of the installed code base on the two machines using the diff feature in TestStand. (If it makes a difference, I'm doing this viewing in TestStand 3.5 since TS3.0 has mysteriously gone corrupt on me at the moment on my main development computer and, if memory serves, you have to uninstall all the later version of TS to reinstall an older version. An altogether fun process, no doubt, but a little time consuming.)
Anyway, the first thing I notice is that very many of the sequence steps have different Step Properties.Step ID values that look something like this: "ID#:2vMTp0db002mQDXArddRSA". Messing with the diff screen showed an option to "Ignore Unique Step Ids" which got rid of these. Regarding these unique step ID's: When are they generated and do they remain constant on a particular machine? Beyond mere curiosity, I wonder because another diff is in some of the "On Pass Target" or "On Custom Condition True Target" under certain Step Properties and the value under there looks suspiciously like those unique ID's (i.e. ""ID#randomstuff""). Are these all dynamically updated at runtime or will I break something by changing those (say if I copy a sequence from one version overwriting it in the other)?
So, I filtered the unique ID's out. The next large area of difference is that many, but by no means all, Labview VI calls have a difference under Step Properties > Flexible Labview Adapter Properties > ViCall > Connector Pane Checksum > Value. Also, in a few other instances, ViCall > error out > Connector Number is different as well. Does this indicate a different underlying VI?
There are a few other differences, but I can interpret those. My goal is to get one sequence file for both machines so the code will be easier to maintain. I do think that some of the VI's with different Connector Pane Checksums may be different between the two installations since one of the different hardware components required a different driver library. This leads to a third question, what does it take to use identical sequence files when the underlying VI's might differ? Is it just the interface needs to be the same? Like the connector pane has the same geometry and data types for the exposed inputs and outputs?
Thanks for any help,
Mike
