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NI TestStand Idea Exchange

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Raydur

Allow renaming (or at least ability to add to the default name) of flow control steps (if, else, while, etc), or define report naming of steps.

Status: New

TS does not allow the ability to rename steps that are of the Flow Control type (i.e. If, Else, For, While, etc.). In a report, these generic names are then used, making it very difficult to know what condition the step was evaluating to determine whether to enter or continue within the flow control block. A step name would normally give the reader of a report some indication as to what is being tested or reported on. This is not the case for these step types.

 

For example, an "If" step that is determining whether a condition is met (and whether to enter into the subsequent steps within the flow control block) simply shows up in the report as:

Step Status Measurement Units Limits
Low Limit High Limit Comparison Type
If {True}  Done        

 

There is no indication of what it evaluated to determine it was True, meaning someone reading the report has no idea what the purpose of the step is. As designer of the test, I can look through the sequence to determine exactly what it was doing, but a report is a useful tool to be able to show to someone not familiar with the test and allow them to be able to see what happened. A report gives the reader the history of the test. Without knowing what a step is for, a lot of the "story" being told by the report is either lost or becomes much harder to follow.

 

I would assume there is a reason as to why these step types are not able to be renamed, but I'm not familiar with what that would be. It would be nice to be able to modify, or at least add to, the step name so that the report gives some indication of what it was that it evaluated. If that is not possible, there should be a simple way to include the parameter/expression being evaluated with the step name in the report. This can be somewhat accomplished using other methods, such as the Additional Results of the Properties tab, but this is not intuitive or clean and I would think this behavior should actually be default, not something the user has to manually create and enable.

 

Regards,

2 Comments
Jimmy_Reumuth
NI Employee (retired)

As a work around, you could make your own copy of the flow control step types and add appropriate default additional results (select the types in the Types View and go to Properties >> General >> Advanced >> Default Additional Results).

 

I believe it was originally done this was to simplify sequence development, but I see your point on how this information would be useful reading the report.

Elaine_R.
Active Participant

even if the report could just show the expression that evaluated to true, that would be something, or have some 'comment' style field that the user can put in plain english what the logic was for? 

 

(as a work around you can log the comment/description for the step using the 'additional results' section of the step  properites... but I agree that it'd be nice, if there was something a little more informative (by default) in the report than just "If({True})"

 

Select-Case steps are much better in regards to 'self documenting' because you can see the full cause/effect, i.e. this variable had that value, and hence these steps ran...  so sometimes I use these instead too....

 

-Elaine R.