Use and Advantage of using TestStand Plugins

[ramsinghsivaramkumar]

Hello Everyone,

I am newbie to learn more about TestStand Architecture. 

I would like to understand about TestStand plugins. What is the advantage of using plugins? We should be able to modify the process model call back sequence to perform the same operation. 

[~jiggawax~ · Accepted solution]

I'll throw my 2 cents into the hat here.

Plugins are one of the best improvements to TestStand in a long time.  Basically what they've done is abstracted the report generation/database logging out of the process models.  It used to be that back in the day you had to edit the process model to customize the report, or override a callback as you mentioned.  But now that is all abstracted out.

Doing this did several things:

• Made it super easy to add your own custom report generation (i.e. excel, csv, legacy databases, etc...)
• Allows you to create configurations for different tests (for example when running in development only log to these things but if in production log to other things)
• Ability to turn them on and off quickly by simply changing a flag
• Allows the report generation to run asynchronously so your tests can keep going if needed
• I can go on and on

To your specific question about overriding callbacks.  Callbacks are meant to be used when you want to deviate from the default behavior.  So it all depends on your use case.  Also, with callbacks you are only limited to the callbacks defined in the plugin or process model.  So you are really just taking an out of the box plugin and changing some behavior for that specific client file.

My rule of thumb is this: If it is just for this test and the plugin supports what I want then do it in a plugin.  If I want it for all tests and/or the functionality doesn't exist then create a plugin.  Example being an Excel plugin (which I've created). 

Hope this helps,

[bienieck · Accepted solution]

In addition to Sam's answer here is my presentation about the subject (more about how it works than when to use it but since you are calling yourself a newbie you might find it useful).

[ramsinghsivaramkumar]

Thank you so much for detailed explanation about plugins and callbacks.

[ramsinghsivaramkumar]

Thank you Michal. Very good presentation.