Make Output panel available as UI ActiveX Control

[ChrisHawk]

The output messages are a good way of sending status messages from the test solution to the end user.  However the control is not available as one of the controls that can be added to user interfaces.

Can this control be made available to be quickly added to a UI and linked to the execution view manager.

Also adding some kind of API interface to be able to capture these messages to a log file would remove the need to implement any custom logging mechanisms.  If possible ability to open multiple file logs within the engine at the same time with each file given some kind of filter rules (for example Severity=”error” or ExecutionId=5).  If logs had to be attributed to an execution ID then they could automatically be closed when the execution ended, otherwise the user would have to manually close each file which could get forgotten and TestStand end up with lots of open file references.

[Mathieu_R.]

I totally agree with the idea of a native OutputMessage ActiveX control : this would be great to easily get the same kind of visualization you have in Sequence Editor (of course you can define a callback to catch UIMessage 40, then copy OutputMessages collection, finally process this copy, and so on...).

However, I think file logging associated to the OutputMessage mechanism is an other functionality, something new - that differs of current behavior of OutputMessage in Sequence Editor. That why for me, file logging doesn't make sense.

» An ActiveX control to get, in our operator interfaces, equivalent functionnality of the Output pane in Sequence Editor.

[ee-jallen]

I second this suggestion of making Output panel available as UI ActiveX Control.  I see it as providing a way to show intermediate data that is nice to show the user during execution.  It doesn't need to log the data permanently for our case as the test report process model logs required tests and we have other mechanisms for logging warning, and errors from application code.