Using WATS LabVIEW tool-kit for reporting

The WATS LabVIEW tool-kit is a powerful link between existing test solutions and WATS report generation. This article discusses how to create a simple LabVIEW program to add data from a simple ASCII test result file to the WATS database.

• Download and install the WATS client (Not a customer yet? Sign up for a free trial at www.wats.com).
• Install the WATS LabVIEW add-on from the WATS Client Configuration panel.
• Download and unzip the attached file WATSReportGenerator.zip (at the end of this article).
• Open the project in NI LabVIEW. The project is created using LabVIEW 2009.

When opening the Main.vi file you may experience that LabVIEW is searching for the WATS TDM Interface dll. This can happen when the dll currently on the PC is of a different version than the one used when the application was created. Simply click cancel and ignore the load warning thrown by LabVIEW.

This example will read a simple ASCII (.txt) file and use the WATS LabVIEW add-on VIs to feed the information to the WATS server

The main VI simply calls a purpose-built file reader VI that filters header data from raw test data, loops through the returned raw data and sorts it into the correct test types, and finally submits the created UUT report.

The Data File Reader VI simply reads out the ASCII data, splits it into two parts (transforms the header data into LabVIEW cluster and step data string array), and returne to the main VI. The case structure in the main loop takes care of adding the test steps to the test report. 

Finally, with all data added to the report, the report is submitted to the WATS server. As this example only takes care of UUT data, the Submit UUT and Close type is set. This assures correct closing of the UUT LabVIEW references before closing the connection to the WATS server.

For this example it doesn’t make much of a difference whether the closing of references happens in the Submit VI or in the Close Connection VI. However, with an additional loop layer for handling of multiple UUTs the program would either have to open and close the connection for each UUT, leading to heavily increase in time consumption, or suffer from memory leaks due to unclosed LabVIEW references.

With the report submitted to the WATS server it is, of course, readily available through the browser interface.