Report Viewer — user guide
Report Viewer opens one NI TestStand ATML report and shows it as a readable document. There is nothing to configure and no license to apply — install it and open a file.
Opening a report
Three ways, whichever fits how you work:
-
Open report… in the toolbar, or
Ctrl+O, and browse to the XML file. - Drag the XML file from Windows Explorer onto the window.
- Right-click the file in Windows and choose Open with → Report Viewer. Useful if you open reports often — set it as the default application for these files and a double-click is enough.
The Recent… dropdown keeps the last eight reports you opened, which is usually what you want when comparing a failure against the run before it.
Reading the report
A report open in Report Viewer. The header carries the execution metadata; the table below lists every test step.
The header gives you the run at a glance: the sequence that was executed, start and end time, duration, the overall result as a colored badge, the operator, the station, the UUT serial number, the product, the UUT type, and the step totals — how many passed, how many failed, how many in total.
The table has one row per test step:
- Name — the step name as it appears in the sequence. Steps that produce several measurements are listed individually.
- Lower limit and Upper limit — with units. A maximum-only check shows just the upper limit; a minimum-only check just the lower one.
- Result — the measured value with its unit.
- Comparison — how the value was evaluated: Range [LSL–USL], Maximum (≤), Minimum (≥), Equal to, and so on. This is what tells you whether an empty limit column is missing data or simply does not apply.
- Status — passed, failed, error, skipped.
- Additional results — extra values a step reported beyond its main measurement.
Finding what failed
Two controls, and they combine. Search steps by name filters the table as you type. Failures only hides everything that passed. The counter on the right always shows how many rows you are looking at out of the total, so you know whether a filter is hiding more than you think.
On a report with 900+ steps, ticking Failures only is usually the first thing to do.
What is not shown
Setup and cleanup SessionActions — opening instruments, waits, housekeeping — are deliberately excluded. A TestStand report contains hundreds of them and none is a test result. What remains are the four step types that actually measure something: NumericLimitTest, NI_MultipleNumericLimitTest, PassFailTest and StringValueTest.
That is also why the step count in the header may not match what TestStand itself reports: this table counts test steps, not sequence actions.
Themes
The button on the right of the toolbar switches between light and dark. The choice is remembered.
When you need more than one report
Report Viewer is deliberately a viewer — one report at a time, no statistics, no export. If you need to compare hundreds of executions, calculate measurement capability, analyze which steps drive your failures or produce PDF and Excel reports, that is Report Analyzer, which reads exactly the same files.