National Instruments NI-488.2 - Manual (Page 58)

© National Instruments Corporation 5-1 NI-488.2 User Manual
5
Debugging Your Application
This chapter describes several ways to debug your application.
NI Spy
The NI Spy utility monitors NI-488.2 API calls made by NI-488.2
applications. If an application does not have built-in error detection
handling, you can use NI Spy to determine which NI-488.2 call is failing.
For more information about using NI Spy, select Help»Help Topics
in NI Spy or refer to Chapter 6,
NI Spy Utility .
Global Status Functions
At the end of each NI-488.2 call, the global status functions ( Ibsta ,
Iberr , and Ibcnt ) are updated. If you are developing an NI-488.2
application, you should check for errors after each NI-488.2 call. If a
NI-488.2 call failed, the high bit of
Ibsta (the ERR bit) is set. For a failed
NI-488.2 call, Iberr contains a value that defines the error. In some error
cases, the value in Ibcnt contains even more error information.
Once you know which NI-488.2 call fails, refer to Appendix B, Status
Word Conditions , and Appendix C, Error Codes and Solutions , for help
understanding why the NI-488.2 call failed. This information is also
available in the NI-488.2 Help. For instructions on accessing the online
help, refer to the
Using the NI-488.2 Documentation section in About This
Manual .
NI-488.2 Error Codes
The error function, Iberr , is meaningful only when the ERR bit in the
status function, Ibsta , is set. For a detailed description of each error and
possible solutions, refer to Appendix C, Error Codes and Solutions .