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Hello,

Many SW-Tool providers have realized that how comfortable it is for a programmeruser to work with dark backgrounds. Microsoft did it in 2013 for visual studio and now browser companies are doing the same. Unfortunately, I can Change background color of MAX and TestStand. This makes longer working painful for eyes.

 

An example of such a bakground is attached with the message.

 

Such a feature will improve ergonomics.

 

Thank you

Regards

Ricky

The current placement creates confusion about what you’re actually closing out of when you click it. It makes me hesitate and wonder what I am about to close. 

 

If you click it when there are multiple files open, it just closes out of the tab on top. If you click it when there is only one file open, it closes out of the whole pane, including the Sequences and Variables windows.

 

TestStandX.png

 

It would eliminate any ambiguity if the X for each file were on the tab for that file and if there were a separate X for the pane, like you typically see in tabbed programs.

 

You could also just put an X next to the pin on each little window instead, like the X in the Step Settings pane and the Insertion Palette in the screenshot above. 

The settings field can easily become too long to see every active option and there's not necesarily any consistency between steps if they have differing options. What I mean by that is if you only set the "Do Not Record Result" (my favorite) option in one step, it will be on the left of the settings field. But if you now set several options on another step, the settings are not lined up so that it becomes hard to see at a quick glance which steps I forgot to not record (because TS still doesn't default to not recording steps). You have to analyze the settings line for each step.

Current settings.PNG

 

I propose something more graphical and ordered. Here's my idea of at least ordered. The text could be replaced with icons representing each setting.

Ordered settings.PNG

 

Then it would be graphical, ordered, and concise. What more can you ask for?

Almost all of our analog measurements are specified in %: example

 

a Power Supply DMM measurement limit is 24.00Vdc +/- 5%

 

We typically have 100+ measurements like this in a project

 

 

Why not include it in the default step types as an optional selection?

I sure would use it, so would my team.

 

I agree that it should not alter existing programs using the default step, but I believe that this feature should have been in Teststand when it was first released.

 

I have run across this in both analog measurements, and the results from an ADC

Think a limit of 0x234 +3%, -7%

 

 

How many times have you found yourself typing double backslashes "C:\\Windows\\System32\\cmd.exe" or even worse, going through a copied path to change every backslash to a double backslash (and inevitably missing one), just so you can pass a file or directory as a constant to a code module or another sequence?

 

string issue.png

 

I'd like to see a symbol for 'explicit string' in the TestStand expression language, much like C# does with the @ symbol.

So if we typed @"C:\windows\temp" we would actually get the string "C:\Windows\temp" instead of "C:\Windows<tab>emp".

 

To really go the extra mile on this:

  • Drag and drop could be enabled, so that any file dragged from another window into an expression box would automatically paste the filename.
  • A browse button could be added to the expression browse dialog which would bring up the usual file open dialog and insert the selected filename.
Message Edited by Josh W on 06-14-2010 12:57 PM
Message Edited by Josh W on 06-14-2010 12:58 PM

Often working with Full Featured UI and Simple UI codes to create custom interfaces for TS, I noticed that the versions shipped with LV2012 are full of deprecated functions.

Also, most of their implementation go against good LV coding rules.

 

Re-writing them could be a great idea !

I've encountered on several occassions, especially with complex testing, customers who are frustrated by the inherent 'flicker' that happens when stepping into and out of subsequences of logic. This leads to people opting to not use sub sequences, or creating complex replacements for the execution view that has a more persistant way of presenting the executed step data.

 

I'd like to see an optional setting for execution viewing that allows for sub sequences to be shown as expandable nodes (perhaps defaulted to 'collapsed') so that low level test operators can see the overview results at the sequence-call level, but so advanced users can expand for details if they're interested without added pulldowns or tabs for additional information.  this could be one more API property similiar to showing one-stepgroup or showing all, so that developers can chose whether to be more efficient, or display-heavy....

 

expanded results on sequenceView

 

In scenarios with dynamic sequence loading, the display might simply show a 'no pre-loading possible' sort of message until the execution actually gets to that portion of the sequence.

 

Cheers, 

 

Elaine R.

Right now, you really can't reliably use anything other than a basic ASCII character set in TestStand, which means that some SI units (such as ohms) cannot be represented in their preferred way (with an omega).  It also means that you can't put non-english characters in your sequence file and reliably have them show up if your sequence file is opened on a different computer with a different language localization (which causes a huge problem if your customer demands support for non-English languages, and has more than one site -- that speaks a different language -- around the world).

 

Make TestStand support Unicode, so we can use the full greek character set for things like units, and so we can type characters from any language in our sequence files, and not have them change to a different character if we open them on a computer with a different localization.

 

TSomega.png

This idea mostly goes along with this idea.  I use type def all the time in LabVIEW, especially with enums.  TestStand can interact with my VIs with enums, but they are handled as a number.  Furthermore, if the enum gets changed, the wrong value of the enum is often used.  I really like the idea of custom data type of an enum.  The ultimate would be if I only had to alter the enum once (in ctl file) and TestStand would automatically update its data type.  This should be the same for clusters.

In order to logically sort sequences within a sequence file, you have to add either a prefix to your sequence names or add dummy sequences between sequence groups:

 

  

 

What would be great is if I could could add sequence groups which let me organize my sequences logically in a tree view. Unfortunately, I can't shoop my vision of that at the moment.

Currently, when you rename a variable, you have to rename all the places where you are using the variable manually. It would be helpful to have a "smart rename" option which, after renaming the variable will update its uses.

 

smart_rename.png

In instances of nested expressions, it would be useful to be able to press tab to indent a line. I propose inserting "n" spaces when pressing tab.

 

Coding style of course varies, but for readability, I rather dislike the following

 

Trim(Locals.SomeLocal) == "" ? (Locals.SomeLocal = "foo",Locals.AnotherLocal = "bar", Locals.SomethingOrRather = "zoo") : False

 ...and much prefer this styling:

 

Trim(Locals.SomeLocal) == "" ? (
                Locals.SomeLocal = "foo",
                Locals.AnotherLocal = "bar",
                Locals.SomethingOrRather = "zoo" ) : False

...but at present the latter is tedious because one has to insert a lot of whitespace manually or worse yet, use another text editor and paste it into TestStand. It would be nice if TestStand's expression editor supported this basic feature available in almost every text editor or IDE.

 

Thanks,

 

Mr. Jim

 

 

 

Hi,

 

I came up with a suggestion to improve the TestStand software ( currently using 4.2.1)- may be in the forthcoming versions.

 

1.Is it possible to slightly dim ( or grey) the steps that are skipped while creating the sequence file? This can help the user to know by looking at the sequence as to what steps have been skipped.

 

2. Ability to assign a color to the steps with particular settings: ex: 'preconditions'.

 

Would this help the user for a quick analysis of the sequence file during sequence creation? I am not totally sure but was just a suggestion for improvement. Any expert comments please?

 

Thanks,

 

Yogesh

I would like to enhance the TestStand Message Box step to add a 'Preview' button.  When selected, it would show how the currently configured message box will look when run.

 

I find that I am often switching around the text, fonts, and other aspects and would like to get that straightened out before run time.  I know you can run the step individually by selecting 'Run Selected Step' but that is tedious, plus you have to take into account preconditions and other functionality.  Normally, I have to remove the precondition (if there is one) as often the step cannot be run by itself.

 

So here is my example with the button added.  Not exactly sure what tab it would belong on.

 

 Message Box with Preview


 

Thanks,

 

Paul

 

When loading large sequence files, TestStand does not display progress and appears to "lock up" both TestStand and the LabVIEW OI.  Sequences with hundreds of steps can take minutes to load.  Operators often incorrectly conclude the application has stopped respoding during long pre-loads.

 

I am suggesting to implement a responsive progress display, allowing the LabVIEW OI to proceed execution, and post the following UI Messages during step pre-load.

 

UIMessageCodes

  1. UIMsg_ProgressPercent–(Value: 11) TestStand step modules post this message to the user interface to notify it to update its progress indicator associated with an execution.
  2. UIMsg_ProgressText–(Value: 12) TestStand step modules post this message to the user interface to notify it to update its progress message associated with an execution.

 

20869i87D31F1755A9EB9F

Currently, if you create a step type and name it OnNewStep, it will execute when an instance of the step is created.  This is pretty confusing to new users - why don't we just have an OnNewStep substep type (like prestep, edit, etc)? Custom steps would then just be meant to be called manually using the Step.ExecuteSubstep() Method as documented in the help.

 

onNewStep.png

 

We could keep the "onNewStep" custom step functionality to maintain backwards compatibility with older step types. 

Please support triple-clicking like in LabVIEW or Firefox...

 

A double-click selects the word at the click position (OLD behavior),

a triple-click selects the whole text (like <CTRL>+<A>, NEW behavior)

 

Thanks!

It would be nice to have some kind of Custom Step which gets triggered when a step is deleted from a sequence. Something very much similar to "OnNewStep" which is triggered when a Step is dropped into the sequence.


We may have an option, say, "OnStepDeletion" to detect the deletion of a step. This will be very helpful in many of the step usages.

 

The TestStand Flow Control Steps like "IF" and "FOR" use the "OnNewStep" to create an "END" step along with them when they are dropped. But there is no means to automatically remove the created "End" when the "FOR" or "IF" Steps are deleted from the sequence. The proposed "OnStepDeletion" can be handy in such cases.

I hope you all will support this idea as it will make many of the functionalities more efficient. 

 

Regards,
Nitz 

(PS : Forgive me if anyone has posted this idea already. I couldn't find any such posts)

Forgive me for the cavalcade of suggestions this week...

 

One of my favorite options in the LabVIEW development environment is the "Find all Instances" context menu option, whereby one is able to locate all calls to the particular SubVI.

 

I have long wished that something similar were available in the TestStand Sequence Editor. I'd like to propose a "Find All Sequence Calls" context menu selection when right-clicking on a sequence in the Sequence pane. This could leverage the Find tool, but save the user from copying and pasting the name of the sequence. (And save the user from configuring the search options to narrow down the results) It'd be nice to be able to define the scope of the "find" operation to either the selected sequence or all sequences in memory, but I'd settle for a simple search of the open sequence.

 

Cheers,

 

Mr. Jim

 

FindAllSequenceCalls.png

 

 

Hi there,

 

This post is just in order to know why there is a user interface available in LabVIEW language (simple or full-featured) suitable for sequential model and NOT for Batch and Parallel models, while these are available in CVI language ?

 

The customer, who is an allaince member and a famous TestStand user (MESULOG) submitted this idea because he had to translate code from CVI to LabVIEW, and thnik this would be a great thing to add to the next release.

 

Cheers,

 

Mathieu,