LabWindows/CVI

[johnkkkk]

I am preparing a distribution (an .MSI file) for a program I have written in LabWindows/CVI.  The "Drivers and Components" tab of the "Edit Installer" dialog tells me that this program has a dependency upon "NI-Visa Runtime 5.0.3" When I then try to build my distribution the process halts mid-way and a dialog asks me if I have the media for "NI Developer Suite 2012 DS1 DVD 3".  I insert that DVD and reply yes. But then a "Distribution Not Found" dialog appears saying that this "location does not contain the correct distribution".  Yet I note that the name of this DVD is "2012DS1DVD3" which sure makes me think it is the DVD that is desired.  I have tried browsing to various locations within this DVD where I see things titled NI-VISA_Runtime (such as the DAQmx_Base folder) but no joy. I can't get past this step and hence I can't build my distribution.  What am I doing wrong?  Thanks.

[MilanR]

Hi johnkkkk,

The KnowledgeBase article titled "Distribution Not Found Error when Building Distribution in LabWindows™/CVI" gives some information near the bottom that is related to the behavior you are seeing. As mentioned in the article it is worth going into the distribution settings and seeing where CVI is expecting the NI-VISA driver installer to be located. If for some reason the build tool is still not able to find the driver, you can reinstall the driver using a download of VISA 5.0.3 from the NI website instead of using the one on the CD. After reinstalling the driver, verify that the build tool looks at the local hard drive cached installation instead of the distribution CD.

[johnkkkk]

I took your advice and downloaded the 490 MB file visa503full.exe from ni.com.  I then ran this installation program and accepted all of the defaults.  No errors appeared during installation.  I then went into LabWindows/CVI and edited my distribution settings.  In the "Drivers and Components" tab of the "Edit Installer" dialog I clicked on "Change Source".  A dialog appeared which I was supposed to use to browse to the VISA runtime distribution.  But I have no idea where that is.  I don't know what type of file to even look for.  I tried various locations such as:

C:\Program Files(x86)\IVI Foundation\VISA
C:\Program Files(x86)\National Instruments\Shared\NI-VISA

but each time I was then told "No distributions were found at this location".  What is the file that holds the NI-VISA runtime?  Thanks.