When you enable the On-The-Fly Reporting option on the Contents tab of the Report Options dialog box, the process models progressively generate the report concurrently with the execution instead of waiting until UUT testing completes. The final report TestStand generates is identical to the report the process model generates at the end of execution. You can use on-the-fly reporting for all report formats.

When you use on-the-fly reporting, you can click the Report pane of the Execution window to view the report during the execution. When the Report pane is the active view of the Execution window while a sequence executes, the report periodically updates as TestStand processes step results.

In addition to generating the report concurrently with execution, on-the-fly reporting periodically persists the current report to a temporary file based on the persistence interval the process model sequences specify. TestStand deletes the temporary file and saves the final report to a file at the end of a UUT loop execution.

Configuring On-the-Fly Report Options

When you enable the Only Display Latest Results option on the Contents tab of the Report Options dialog box, on-the-fly reporting periodically purges internal data structures while testing the UUT. As a result, the report TestStand displays on the Report pane of the Execution window shows only the results for the steps on-the-fly reporting has not yet purged. The persisted temporary and final report files contain all the step results. TestStand always purges internal data structures when UUT testing completes.

Note The time required to generate reports on-the-fly varies depending on the report format, but you must also consider other benefits of each report format to determine the best format to use for an application. For example, generating an ASCII report on-the-fly might require less time than generating an XML report on-the-fly, but you can more easily parse data from an XML report than you can from an ASCII report. Effectively parsing data from an ASCII report might require that you develop a custom parsing tool.

Use the Discard Results or Disable Results when not Required By Model option in the Model Options dialog box to conserve memory by discarding step results after TestStand records each result.

Note If you have configured the process model to use multiple process model plug-ins and you enable the Discard Results or Disable Results When Not Required By Model option in the Model Options dialog box, the process model discards or disables results only when you have configured all process model plug-ins to process results on-the-fly.

On-the-Fly Report Server

In addition, you can use the on-the-fly report server in conjunction with objects of the ReportSection class to create a custom on-the-fly report in any format or layout, including custom report formats. The ProcessOTFStepResults sequence of the reportgen_atml.seq, reportgen_xml.seq, reportgen_html.seq, and reportgen_text.seq report generation sequence files, located in the <TestStand>\Components\Models\TestStandModels directory, calls the on-the-fly report server.