LabVIEW Test Executive Support
Test Executive Toolkit 5.1 Troubleshooting Guide
National Instruments released LabVIEW 5.0 in 1998. Several of the changes made to LabVIEW allowed further enhancements to the Test Executive Toolkit. The diagrams for the engine library no longer needed to be removed. Instead, they were password protected. This made it easier to troubleshoot any problems that might arise because the technical support engineers could now look at the Engine library functions to see what was happening. It also meant that the VIs could be moved into future versions of LabVIEW and recompiled.
This version of the Test Executive Toolkit installation also installed some new options in the project menu. These options are described in detail in the LabVIEW Test Executive Reference Manual that comes with the toolkit, but basically they are shortcuts for distributing and launching the Test Executive and for converting sequence files from previous versions of the toolkit.
The method for creating sequence files was also modified. In this version of the Test Executive the sequence files were actually just an ASCII file with a specific format. Previous versions were not ASCII files. This information is useful when trying to migrate from one version of the toolkit to another. Using the migration tools as mentioned previously is required because the sequence file from a previous version could not be interpreted directly by this or future versions of the toolkit. Additionally, relative paths to code resources could now be used in the sequence files. It was easier to migrate the Test Executive and all sequence files and code resources to a new machine because the directory structures did not have to be the same on both machines as long as the relative paths did not change.
This version of the toolkit also used the new LabVIEW VI server to call VIs dynamically. The VI server significantly reduces the time to call a VI dynamically compared with the previous way that the Test Executive had loaded VIs dynamically.
Also, this version of the Test Executive supported localized decimal points. This feature made it more compatible with many systems use different decimal notations.
A common source of confusion with this version of the Test Executive is that even though the name was changed to Test Executive 5.1, it is meant to run under LabVIEW 5.x. Therefore any version of LabVIEW 5 should run this version of the Test Executive. The previous version of the Test Executive, named Test Executive 5.0, can run only under LabVIEW 4.x.
The Test Executive Run-Time Engine that is shipped with this version of the Toolkit is built in LabVIEW 5.0. All of the VIs that are called as part of a step in the Sequence Editor need to have been saved as LabVIEW 5.0 VIs. This means that either the VIs were originally written in LabVIEW 5.0, or they have been mass-compiled into LabVIEW 5.0.
