NI TestStand Idea Exchange

When a step cannot be preloaded due to the prototype being out of date (if, for example, a VI was updated after it had been placed in a sequence), an error message pops up telling the user what is wrong. This can then be used to track down where the step is that is causing the issue. Some of the error descriptions get quite lengthy.

While this does provide the user with information as to where the error is occuring, the only option is to click "OK", which then closes the message. In long sequences with many subsequence calls and steps (many of which may be similarily named), it is cumbersome to find the specific step that was listed in the error message that is now no longer viewable. At times I find myself having to get to the general area where I thought the error was listed as occuring, and then click RUN again just to get the error message to pop up again, and then continue narrowing it down (repeating this process several times). This is very cumbersome.

There is a simple solution to this issue. The easiest method would be to simply include a second button in the error message that brings you directly to the step that is causing the issue (with it selected in the step window). This would solve the main issue of trying to find the step that was listed in the error message as being the problem.

To go a step further, there could be a button that simply activates the "reload step prototype" that you have to do once you are at the step that is out of date.

To go even a step further, and solve another issue I would like to see remedied, there could be the option of reloading all steps that call that module (since they are now likely all out of date and need the prototype refreshed). Currently, if a VI is called repeated throughout the sequence, then each one must be found and have its prototype reloaded manually. This is very tedious.

There may be other preloading errors besides the "prototype out of date" issue (ex: VI not found, etc.) that could use the same functionality of a button that brings you to the offending step, but this is what I am running into at the moment.

Regards,

If there's a way to do this already feel free to ignore this suggestion 🙂

I have a process that spawns N parallel measurements for a given DUT at one point during code, and then has a series of wait steps later, to collect all the results / errors / etc.

I have a reaonable timeout, with error generation enabled on the Wait steps as a safety mechanism in event a process hangs (rare, but not impossible). During normal execution these timeouts never trip, and all runs beautifully.

If I set a breakpoint/single-step my execution to troubleshoot one of the measurements during design/debug, often times it takes a while before I 'resume', and when I do, the timeout on the parallel wait immediately trips with error.

would there be some way to make the Wait step's timeout logic 'pause' while execution paused and 'resume' when sequence is executing normally? that way the error I'm trying to trap during debug won't get confused with an irrelevant error for 'you took too long'...

i know I can put conditional logic on the timeouts to discard the error if running inside the debugger, but it'd be cool if the step was just smarter in general

--Elaine R