Report External Dependancies Used in Test Report

[WiMAX_Eng]

Hi,

Is it possible to report at runtime a list of DLLs, LabVIEW libraries etc. that were used in a particular run of a sequence?  I'd like to record what versions (or file dates maybe in the absence of version number) that were used when a particular run of a sequence was made.  This is obviously different to analysing a test sequence at design time.

[Andy.G]

Hey WiMAX_Eng

What you are asking for is not particularly straight forward, however is possible. There are to my knowledge two different ways of doing this.

Firstly, you could setup a “background” sequence to run continuously in parallel to the main sequence which constantly calls for what is loaded in memory, this will give you the DLL’s and LabVIEW code modules and possibly the libraries. This will however slow the program overall and you are not guaranteed to get all the information every time.

The Second option would be to programmatically request this information via the code modules within your sequence. This data will be logged in the same way as normal; however you will need to modify the report sequence to deal with this new type of data. I would strongly recommend this approach, and avoid as much as possible constant memory calls used in the first suggestion. A program you could possibly use to implement this process is dependency walker.

Dependency Walker is a free utility that scans any 32-bit or 64-bit Windows module (exe, dll, ocx, sys, etc.) and builds a hierarchical tree diagram of all dependent modules. For each module found, it lists all the functions that are exported by that module, and which of those functions are actually being called by other modules. Another view displays the minimum set of required files, along with detailed information about each file including a full path to the file, base address, version numbers, machine type, debug information, and more.

Lastly I would also like to ask why you require the information, if you wanted to know what software and drivers you have you could always interrogate max at the beginning of the sequence to get a full list of your drivers and software installed on that PC.

Below is a link I think you may find useful when you need to generate the reports for your test stand code:

http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/8289