TestStand (Shared Object) in show step in variable tab.

[noog]

After selecting show step in variable context (tab) during execution, expanding the selected step I see the following, (plus more):  

+TS (Shared Object)                              Step Type TEinf (Container)

What does (Shared Object) mean? I posted previously about changing "InBuff" values on the fly. But something has happened to prevent this and I can't figure out what it is but, I think this shared object property has something to do with it.

From a TestStand surface scatcher.

thanks

[dug9000]

Shared object means that all of the properties underneath and including that object really just point back to the original version of the properties. In the case of TS, this means they all point back to the edit time version of the step. Changing the properties under TS at runtime is generally something you should avoid doing because you will be editing the actual edit time version of the step. This also has multithreading consequences because shared properties could potentially be accessed by more than one thread at the same time, thus if one thread is modifying them while another thread is accessing them, you can get unpredictable results. The properties under TS are meant to be read-only at runtime.

Hope this helps explain things,

-Doug