TestStand crashes if I'm using "Diff Sequence Files"

[mstern]

If I am using "Diff Sequence Files", TestStand (2.0.1f1) immeadetly closes without any messages, and I've to restart TestStand again.
Same happens rarely if I run my TestStand application (e.g. after testing 75 UUT's). I've got this bug by using the Secuence editor as well by using an operator interface.
Win XP, Nt4, LabView 6i

Any ideas how to fix that, or how to debug if everything is closed.

Thanks for any hints,
martin

[Alejandro_del_Castillo]

martin,

Do you experience this behavior regardless of wich sequence files you are comparing or is this specific to two particular sequence files?

If you experience the crash for any pair of sequence files, then something in your current installation of Teststand might be corrupted. If this is the case, I highly recommend you reinstall the package. If this is specific to 2 sequence files, please attach them on your response to check if the crash is reproducible.

Best Regards,

Alejandro del Castillo
Ni

[mstern]

Alejandro,
this problem happens with different sequence files. Sometimes the System Exception �System Exception Error Code: -17502� is shown.
But there are also files where I haven�t any problem by using �Diff Sequence Files�. For your information: all files have the same structure.
Attached you�ll find the 2 files where the problem occurs every time without an Error Code.

But the other serious problems are the crashes while running the TestStand application. That means during the test the TestStand application would close without any messages. And this problem occurs very rarely and I�ve haven�t got a chance to debug.

Any hints will be appreciated

Best regards
Martin

[Alejandro_del_Castillo]

Martin,

I was able to reproduce the behavior that you are experiencing on my side. I think that your sequence file is corrupted. If you open each file and copy all the steps to new sequence files, then the "Diff Sequence Files" tool will work.

This might explain why you are experiencing inexplicable crashes. If this doesn't solve the problem:

- Try to log to a file the step that just executed. You can do this by overwriting the SequenceFilePostStep Engine Callback. This substep will run after each step is executed, this way you can know exactly after which step your sequence crashed.

- Monitor the memory usage of your system through the Windows task manager or a similar tool. This might show a memory leak if the memory usage i
s constantly growing.

Hope this helps!

Alejandro
Ni

[Scott_Richardson]

Martin -
I will take a look at this a little closer to let you know why the crash is occurring. Even if the sequence file is corrupt, the sequence editor should catch the error and allow you to continue.

Scott Richardson (NI)

[Scott_Richardson]

Martin -
Thank you for letting us know about this one. There is a problem in the diffing code in the sequence editor where some high level code does a case insensitive compare of steps, and when displaying the differences, some low level code used case sensitive comparison. This causes the error that you are seeing. This behavior still exists in TestStand 3.0 and should be fixed in a subsequent release. You are the first to report this problem. The only workaround is to ensure that when diffing files, try to ensure that step names do not differ in case only.

Scott Richardson (NI)

[Greil]

The problem is stil alive in TestStand 3.0

I have 2 big files which i want to diff.
I do not want to post the 2 big files here so i copied only one step from each sourcefile to a new empty sequencefile.

TestStand also crashes when 'Diff' the new small new Sequence Files.

Attachments:
BatchModel A2005.seq
BatchModel B2005.seq

[Caroline Bright]

Hi Martin,

As you can see in the post by Scott Richardson (post #6), this behavior was not scheduled to be fixed in version 3.0. The issue should be fixed in later versions. Did you mean to say that you wee using 3.1? If so, could you attach your files again as they did not seem to get posted on the forum. Or place them on our ftp site at ftp.ni.com\incoming.
Otherwise, if you are using 3.0, this is still an expected behavior as the behavior was not scheduled to be fixed in 3.0.

Thanks,
Caroline
National Instruments

[Greil]

(sorry for missing attachment)
i have just installed a teststand 3.1 evaluation version.
With 3.1 the Diff operation works fine.
With 3.0 the Diff operation will crash.

thanks.


Here is a small whish regarding "Diff Sequence Files":
My customer want the result of the Diff process in a file.
So my question : Is is possible to save the result as a HTML-File (including the tree on the left side)?

[Caroline Bright]

Hi Martin,

As stated before, the bug still existed in version 3.0. The problem was then fixed for 3.1. So the behavior you are seeing is expected. You can get around the issue by having steps that differ by more than just case.

As to the question about saving the diff as an html file. That is currently not supported but I will submit a product suggestion to our R&D group.

Thanks,
Caroline
National Instruments