Step ID Replication / Id's becoming non-unique

[WildBlueYonder]

I am having an issue with TestStand 3.1.0.9095 regarding steps losing their unique ID's during the editing process. This was not troublesome or noticed until I began utilizing some flow control (using Post-actions) which resulted in my post actions (custom expression with different landing points for true/false) pointing to the first instance of the non-unique ID. I instead tried using Goto's and Labels which resulted in the same effect. I recreated the same steps within my sequence, and moved them before the misbehaving steps, only to find that they had lost their identities as well. Frustrated, I created an empty sequence and began recoding the steps (utilizing post-actions) this ended with the same net result, my steps are losing their unique IDs. Is there a way to unlock the ID fields for editing to restore their 'uniqueness', or has anyone encountered this phenomenon before? Thanks in advance.

[Patrick_P.]

Hey WildBlueYonder,

The steps should not be losing their unique ID's during the editing process.  I just wanted to verify, by unique id you mean the id step property in the TS container right?  Also could you post a sequence file that exhibits this behavior or give us some steps to reproduce it?

[WildBlueYonder]

That is correct, the ID field under the TS container is being overwritten during the editing process (this happens prior to any execution.) Unfortunately, our security protocol prevents me from posting the .seq files, but I will retrace my steps to determine when the ID field is being corrupted.

One note: our sequence files use custom callbacks to a VB front end which are edited by an external XML editor. Is it possible that the XML editor is corrupting the ID field, or is this field not writable by external applications?

-Andrew

[James_Grey]

It is very likely that your custom editor is the source of the ID change.  How does it edit the step? Does it create a new step from the edited XML and replace the old one?

The Step.UniqueStepId property is read-only, but if your custom editor must recreate the step, it could probably use something like

newStep.AsPropertyObject().SetValString("TS.Id", 0, savedUniqueId)

to copy the previous ID to the newly created step.