Terminating and Aborting Executions
- Updated2025-03-28
- 2 minute(s) read
The menus in the TestStand Sequence Editor and TestStand User Interfaces include commands to stop execution before the execution completes normally. The TestStand API includes corresponding methods to stop execution from inside a code module or to determine whether the execution stopped. You can issue a stop request at any time to stop one execution or all executions. Stop requests do not take effect in each execution until the currently executing code module for each thread in the execution returns control.
When you terminate an execution, all the Cleanup steps, including subsequences the Cleanup steps call, execute normally and disregard the pending termination. If you terminate an execution, or reselect Terminate while a Cleanup step is running and the step monitors for termination, the step terminates prematurely, and TestStand proceeds to execute the next Cleanup step. Terminating a Cleanup step terminates only that step, and the execution proceeds with the next Cleanup step. When you terminate an execution while the client sequence file is running, the default process model continues to run, possibly testing the next UUT or generating a report.
When you abort an execution, the Cleanup steps do not run, and the process model does not continue. Abort an execution in cases when you want an execution to completely stop as soon as possible. In general, it is better to terminate execution so the Cleanup steps can return the system to a known state. Abort an execution only when you are debugging or when you are sure it is safe to skip the Cleanup steps for a sequence.