"Memory effect" when loading .xls file information using PropertyLoader

[Henrik9000]

I have a TestStand 3.1 application, in which the sequence start off loading a number of configuration settings embedded in different .xls files using the PropertyLoader.

Unfortunately, Teststand sometimes loads the previously used .xls files (same name, located elsewhere), rather than those it were supposed to. In particular, if a .xls file is missing, Teststand will often (always?) load a previously used file with the same name, but located elsewhere. VERY inconvinient when testing ...!

Is there any way to remove this unfortunate "memory effect"?

[dug9000]

Are you perhaps using relative paths with search directories? What could be happening is that since your files have the same name, when one doesn't exist, TestStand is finding the other one in its search paths. If this is the problem you can avoid this by carefully managing your search directories and where you locate your files such that if the file is missing it will not find the other version of it (In other words, you can rely on relative to the sequence file filepaths as long as the entire directory structure isn't in your search paths for another reason, for example you might have a recursively searched search directory at the root directory of your files).

Hope this helps
-Doug

[Henrik9000]

Thanks for your response!

Yes, I am using relative search paths. I have disabled some unnecessary paths with no success, but it's probably worthwhile to go through them again.

Actually, I have several installations of basically the same application, all using same .seq, but each including their own .xls config files in their own sub-dirs. These config files define among other things the menu given at application startup.

The config files are located according to this scheme: Program Files\CompanyName\AppName\Version\bin\config\

[dug9000]

Where are your sequence files located? If the .xls files are relative to them you might want to use a more fully specified relative path to the files (for example: bin\config\filename.xls) rather than just filename.xls. Then becareful to remove search directories (especially recursive ones) that you might have added to find these files. It's very easy to get into problems with recursive search directories or by adding too many search directories if you have lots of files with the same names, by instead using paths relative to the sequence file you can avoid the need to add search directories in many cases.

Hope this helps,
-Doug