Make Users.ini files shareable by different versions of TestStand

[RyanWright]

At our facility, we have a shared Users.ini file on a network that is used by all test systems in our entire organization (somewhere between 150 and 200 systems).  It contains hundreds of different users and many different user groups and its contents change frequently.  I recently upgraded to a newer version of TestStand and learned that a single Users.ini cannot be used by multiple versions of TestStand; it can only be used by the version of TestStand in which it was created (or saved, when upgrading).

This is problematic because it means I have to maintain multiple Users.ini files for the different versions of TestStand in use at my facility; whenever I need to make a user change, instead of changing it in one location, I have to make the same change in multiple Users.ini files.  Because there is a mixture of TestStand versions in use at my facility, it would be really nice if different versions of TestStand were able to use the same Users.ini file.

[Scott_Richardson]

RyanWright, you may already know this; you can configure the StationOptions.ini file to use a shared location. The path is stored in the testexec.ini file for each version of TestStand. This was also discussed in this forum post.

You are correct that the file is versioned, but a file saved with an older version of TestStand can be opened by a newer version of TestStand, so you could require that the file be saved only by a version of TestStand that is the oldest that you need to support. You could make the file read-only to prevent any TestStand systems from modifying the file.

An alternative is to create your list of logins in a separate non-versioned file and modify all the FrontEndCallbacks.seq file on your test systems to perform custom login validation.