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The 'Run a program' action

Introduction

During a test, you can use an Action to run a program.. This can be used to run any Microsoft Windows executable or batch file on your computer. You might use an external program, for example, to run a program that can control some external I/O that is not directly controllable from ANY-maze.

When setting up the 'Run a program' Action in a procedure, you will enter details of the program to be run - for more details, see The 'Run a program' window.

Errors and warnings

Sometimes, running an external program will fail. If this happens, you'll see an error or a warning in the results of your test to indicate that this has happened. This is in case the external program is operating a critical part of your test, to make sure that you have been warned that the program failed to run successfully.

There are various reasons why an external program may fail to run properly, but these reasons can be split into two types:

The program actually failed to run - for example, the path to the program entered in the Run a program window was not specified correctly. In this case, the failure will be logged as an error - the program did not run at all.

All Windows programs and batch files return a value to the operating system when they are run. This value defaults to zero, meaning that the execution was successful. Any non-zero return value from a program will be logged as a warning - it is up to you to check what this return value from the program means, and see whether it indicates an error that you need to worry about for the results of your test.

ANY-maze help topic T0439