Programmatically get VeriStand device channels

[joedowdle]

Is there a way to automatically populate a document with all the device channels in VeriStand?  Basically I want to be able to run this program and generate an alias channel address template for a given system so that a test engineer can just populate the names they want to use for aliases.  I'm talking about getting the addresses that look like this:  Targets/Controller/Chassis1/Hardware... or Custom Devices... etc.

I know that if I use a .NET constructor I can access of all this for a given system def. file by using invoke nodes and property nodes.  The problem is that I can't find a way to populate a list with everything in the SDF, if I know exactly what the SDF looks like I can do it no problem.  I'd like to find a way to be able detect what is there and then populate a list.

Does anyone know how to do this? I was thinking that maybe there is a recursive way of programming it and checking if something is there for not, but I'm honestly not an experienced enough programmer to know how to set up a good recursive method for this.

Alternatively, I could possibly get way to do this (minus custom devices) by pulling the same information from MAX about what is the PXI chassis.

Thanks in advance for the help.

[Jarrod_S.]

Try this out. Open Project Explorer in VeriStand. Right click on the Workspace item in the tree and select Export Channel Resource. A dialog pops up where you can select which channels to export.

When you click OK a tab-delimited file is generated with the channel list and some basic information about the channel, such as whether it can be written to. For example:

Channel Name Alias Channel Path Type Description Units Readable Writable Faultable Scalable
DI0 Targets/Controller/Hardware/Chassis/DAQ/Dev1/Digital Input/port0/DI0 Digital pin 0 on port 0 TRUE FALSE TRUE FALSE
DI1 Targets/Controller/Hardware/Chassis/DAQ/Dev1/Digital Input/port0/DI1 Digital pin 1 on port 0 TRUE FALSE TRUE FALSE

[joedowdle]

I will look into that when I get to my work station later today.  Do you know if there is anyway to access this exporter through LabVIEW and pull them into a program automattically?  We are looking for ways to reduce the chance of manual error.  I'd like to pull all of the resources from VeriStand just as the exporter does, allow a user to enter in names for the channels and have it automatically generate an alias list for the user.

[Brandyn]

there is a way to do this 🙂 Its currently being developed....stay tuned

[joedowdle]

That's good to hear.  It will be very helpful to have that feature since different test benches will eventually have different names/cards/etc. as the initial software is used more and more.  Do you have an idea when this is going to be released?

[Brandyn]

Unfortunately I do not.  But I would imagine if my company sees there is a real desire for it in the VeriStand community, that will push up production.