Add Quick Drop to TestStand

[Manooch_H]

How many of you would benefit from the addition of a feature similar to LabVIEW's Quick Drop?

The functionality that initially comes to mind would be typing to search for your desired step type or step template and dropping it into the sequence you are developing. Please add comments for any additional functionality you might like to see in a TestStand step Quick Drop (for example, you may want TestStand to automatically navigate to the Step Properties of a step after it is dropped from Quick Drop).

Please also add comments for any other situations/scenarios (outside of adding steps to a sequence) where you might benefit from a Quick Drop-like functionality. Thank you.

[Josh_W]

Some thoughts:

Quick Drop's purpose is to speed up development by removing mouse-intensive operations. It was probably originally imagined as a replacement for "Drag and Drop" (as the name suggests).

Potential uses for Quick Drop include places where Drag and Drop or Right-Click are used. There are only a few places in TestStand that I can think of offhand where the keyboard cannot easily be used to replace mouse operations:

• Inserting steps into a sequence(requires right-click or drag and drop from insertion palette)
• Inserting sequences into a sequence file (requires right-click or drag and drop from templates)
• Inserting variables into the variables view/step properties/station globals/custom types
• Creating custom types (requires right-click to get to properties)
• Moving from Steps pane to Step Settings pane.

Navigating to the step properties is already an easy keyboard operation (CTRL-E or CTRL-M) for most steps and may not need to be built into quick-drop. For steps without a module or an edit panel, CTRL-Tab does allow movement between panes, but is cumbersome for a move beteen a step and its properties. If a default keyboard shortcut is made for Step Properties/Type Properties, that would cover this use case nicely.

I must admit that I have not used the sequence analyzer much, so I do not know if it is a candidate for quick-drop functionality.

Basically, having a quick-drop like functionality for inserting steps would be helpful (especially for my current project where we have lots of custom steps), but I don't see many uses for it beyond that.

[WireWeaver]

You can sign up to test this feature at ni.com/beta

[WireWeaver]

https://zone.ni.com/reference/en-XX/help/370052AA-01/tshelp/infotopics/2019whatsnew/#quickdrop