Test References for manufacturing test equipment

[dle]

I've been using DF to develop GUI application for many test equipment. Most of the time, I made the application a little flexible for portability and support by saving all the test parameters such as PASS/FAIL into a .csv file (I call this references file). Every time the application tool is open, it will first goes look for and read this reference file -> parse the data -> save test parameters in global variables.

This way, if there is any specification change to the tested device, the engineer just modify the test parameter in the reference file without hard coding the app.

However, I see this way is so vulnerable. If the test equipment is operated by a contract manufacturer (CM), any CM's technician can opens and modify the reference file.

I'm looking for a better solution, please advise.

Thanks.    

[AzeoTech]

This is a problem with most any application and the solution depends on the level of security you need.  I'm going to assume that you just want something that someone can't just open in notepad and edit, but you don't need full encryption.  What I would do is store all your settings in an array, then use the to. and from. functions to convert the array into an array of bytes that you can then write out to the file.  You could even add a checksum where you add up all the values in the array and store the result at the end.  Then if someone tweaked it, you would know it.  You could of course also just take the string you were generating as CSV and use asca() to convert it to an array of bytes, then, say, add 5 to each element, then convert it back to a string using chra() then write it to disk.  I'd add a binary checksum at the end too, doing the adding before you did chra().