topic Re: NI LabVIEW CLI won't start LabVIEW VI Server fast enough in Continuous Integration

NI LabVIEW CLI won't start LabVIEW VI Server fast enough

Bas.v.E — Mon, 24 Sep 2018 12:22:01 GMT

So our setup is as follows:

We have a Jenkins server with BlueOcean and a windows 7 slave machine with Labview 2017 and the Labview CLI tool installed. The Jenkins server connects through SSH with the slave. So after a checkout of my code I run a build.bat with this code:

SET cur_dir=%cd%
echo %cur_dir%
LabVIEWCLI -LogToConsole true -OperationName ExecuteBuildSpec -ProjectPath "%cur_dir%\CITestProject.lvproj" -BuildSpecName "Main Application"

The problem I'm running into is that the Labview CLI tool won't start labview fast enough, so after a time of <unspecified> seconds. I get this error code:

Error code : -350000

Error message : LabVIEW CLI: (Hex 0xFFFAA8D0) The CLI for LabVIEW failed to establish a connection with LabVIEW. Ensure LabVIEW is running with VI server enabled on the correct port number. To enable VI server in LabVIEW, select "Tools>>Options>>VI Server" and enable the "TCP/IP" checkbox. If the port number under "TCP/IP" is not 3363, you must specify the port number using the "-PortNumber" argument. 

An error occurred while running the LabVIEW CLI.

After testing some thing I noticed my build works when Labview is already running before starting the build.bat.

The other thing I found was, the build.bat starts LabviewCLI, which starts labview in the background, but because of the timeout of the labviewCLI it shuts labview down again.

So without hacking my way through and starting labview before executing LabviewCLI, is there a way to increase the timeout time or something like that?

Re: NI LabVIEW CLI won't start LabVIEW VI Server fast enough

rdecarre11 — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 14:19:33 GMT

It looks like you are using NI's LabVIEW CLI, is that right?

I use Wiresmith and I have had great luck with it. Maybe give that a shot?

If not, I only have a couple comments that helped me.

Are you using a windows machine that is running a UI thread while all this is happening? I have noticed dramatic gains in load-times when I run-as System and don't log in to Windows. (You mentioned SSH so that may already be the case)
If you're using a Jenkinsfile, you can wrap script in a timestamps() function to log how long between writes to the console. It can help keep track of the length of all the various steps:
- https://jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/syntax/#options (scroll down a bit)
Are you using a license server? If so, probably create a disconnected license so LV doesn't wait for the server.
Configure LV to start up a little faster by changing the loading options https://www.ni.com/docs/en-US/bundle/labview-api-ref/page/resource/dialog/preferencesdialog/preferencepages/prefpage-functionbrowser.html I use "Load palettes when needed"

Re: NI LabVIEW CLI won't start LabVIEW VI Server fast enough

EricR — Mon, 24 Sep 2018 18:28:35 GMT

All of the recommended things to try from @rdecarre11 seem like good suggestions to me.

LabVIEW does take some time to launch on a cold start. The Wiresmith and NI versions of the LabVIEW CLI are implemented differently so they could require different initialization times for LabVIEW to be responsive.

How much time are you finding that it takes before the LabVIEW CLI does respond? Especially with the startup changes suggested by "rdecarre11" it seems like it should only be a few seconds.

There is no directly way to change the timeout of the LabVIEW CLI.

Re: NI LabVIEW CLI won't start LabVIEW VI Server fast enough

adambro — Tue, 25 Sep 2018 08:55:56 GMT

Whilst helpful, these suggestions really sound like ways of dealing with something that doesn't work. You should be able to use the LabVIEW CLI "out of the box" without fiddling around trying to optimise LabVIEW launch times, I would suggest.

I'm seeing this same issue on my Jenkins build server and whilst it isn't the highest performance set-up, it does exceed the minimum system requirements.

I think LabVIEW CLI really should be able to cope with this better but at the very least there should be the option to specify a timeout period where the default is too short.

Re: NI LabVIEW CLI won't start LabVIEW VI Server fast enough

Bas.v.E — Tue, 25 Sep 2018 09:24:35 GMT

Whilst helpful, these suggestions really sound like ways of dealing with something 
that doesn't work. You should be able to use the LabVIEW CLI "out of the box" without 
fiddling around trying to optimise LabVIEW launch times, I would suggest.

This is exactly my point. I don't want to create workarounds, which I have to document because other people need to know how I did it for that project.

How much time are you finding that it takes before the LabVIEW CLI does respond?  
Especially with the startup changes suggested by "rdecarre11" it seems like it 
should only be a few seconds.

It takes like 58 seconds or so to start labview before I can use it with the CLI tool. And that is mainly because it's loading all the plugins we use for the project. But this should not matter if NI developed the tool to wait for LabVIEW.

I'm also hoping NI will see this post and do some fixing for the CLI tool. I will even volunteer to test functionality for them if they want to.

Re: NI LabVIEW CLI won't start LabVIEW VI Server fast enough

rdecarre11 — Wed, 26 Sep 2018 16:47:29 GMT

Yeah I certainly agree that workarounds are not ideal, and the fact that we have to deal with this subpar tool is also not ideal.

@ni-people: can we get a build of the CLI in which we can configure the start-up timeout?

Re: NI LabVIEW CLI won't start LabVIEW VI Server fast enough

rdecarre11 — Wed, 26 Sep 2018 16:49:58 GMT

So I found a couple things in the .ini you can try:

[LabVIEWCLI]
DefaultPortNumber = 3363
AppendToLogFile = FALSE
OpenAppReferenceTimeout = 3000
AppExitTimeout = 10000
DefaultLabVIEWPath = ""
OpenAppReferenceRetryCount = 3

You can try to change theOpenAppReferenceTimeout or the retries. Looks like default is about 9 seconds.

Re: NI LabVIEW CLI won't start LabVIEW VI Server fast enough

EricR — Wed, 26 Sep 2018 20:08:47 GMT

There are a couple of INI tokens we put into LabVIEW CLI for exactly this case. They are :

OpenAppReferenceTimeoutInSecond - specifies the amount of time the first attempt to open a VI server connection to LabVIEW should wait before timing out.
AfterLaunchOpenAppReferenceTimeoutInSecond - how long the CLI should try opening a VI server connection *after launching LabVIEW* before it times out.

These tokens are still in the nature of "workaround". I'm pulling some of the development team into this discussion for thoughts on making the CLI so that it doesn't start passing along parameters until LabVIEW has launched. That said, there could be things on the system that actually prevent LabVIEW from loading correctly and in those cases, you do want to have a timeout so that the app isn't hung waiting for something that will never complete.

Re: NI LabVIEW CLI won't start LabVIEW VI Server fast enough

Bas.v.E — Thu, 27 Sep 2018 15:55:39 GMT

For now the INI file solution does the trick, I would love to see the improvements in the future.

maybe not the best topic to address this but I can't seem to find an "report an issue with this page" button on this page, but I've found a mistake on the operations webpage that took me to long to figure out.

on the VIAnalyzer section there is a piece of example code where this:

-ReportSaveType "html"

should be this:

-ReportSaveType "HTML"

Re: NI LabVIEW CLI won't start LabVIEW VI Server fast enough

Bas.v.E — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 10:43:53 GMT

So any update on this? I saw that the operations page still isn't updated with the correct example codes.

and I was wondering if there is a release date for the SP1 of the CLI?

Re: NI LabVIEW CLI won't start LabVIEW VI Server fast enough

EricR — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 18:45:31 GMT

Bas.v.E,

What "operations" page are you looking at and what example codes are you asking to have updated?

I'm checking on the CLI. If the component was updated with the LabVIEW 2018 SP1 release, NI will post a new version to NI.com in early January.

Re: NI LabVIEW CLI won't start LabVIEW VI Server fast enough

Bas.v.E — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 14:20:05 GMT

This operation help page:

https://www.ni.com/docs/en-US/bundle/labview/page/predefined-command-line-operations.html

on the VIAnalyzer section there is a piece of example code where this:

-ReportSaveType "html"

should be this:

-ReportSaveType "HTML"

Re: NI LabVIEW CLI won't start LabVIEW VI Server fast enough

Jon_Kokott — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 19:44:46 GMT

Where is the ini you speak of?

<LV_Version_Path>\labview.ini?

no keys are currently there for me in any labview version.

Re: NI LabVIEW CLI won't start LabVIEW VI Server fast enough

Bas.v.E — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 19:48:15 GMT

The Union file is located in

C:/program files(86)/national instruments/shared/labviewcli/

Re: NI LabVIEW CLI won't start LabVIEW VI Server fast enough

cknowlto — Thu, 14 May 2020 14:16:13 GMT

This is still a serious problem. I can not find any combination of timeouts that will allow my Jenkins labview builds to succeed.

I am using labview 2019 SP1 on Windows Server 2016

I have tried timeouts from 5 - 60 seconds and I almost always get Error Code 350000

Any suggestions from the crowd?

Re: NI LabVIEW CLI won't start LabVIEW VI Server fast enough

ryan_sheppard — Thu, 14 May 2020 14:22:22 GMT

https://github.com/JamesMc86/G-CLI

Use this instead. All my similar issues were solved.

Re: NI LabVIEW CLI won't start LabVIEW VI Server fast enough

cknowlto — Thu, 14 May 2020 14:57:15 GMT

So someone wrote a wrapper to fix this issue instead of NI actually fixing the problem?

So why do we pay these guys all this money for support then?

Re: NI LabVIEW CLI won't start LabVIEW VI Server fast enough

ryan_sheppard — Thu, 14 May 2020 18:54:59 GMT

I mean, it's an open source project by an individual who has contributed to the LV community for years. I like that it's an open source solution, we don't need to rely on NI for everything.

NI most likely has many other internal projects they are working on. Spending time on a tool that I would guess less than 1% of the community uses doesn't make business sense.

G-CLI gets the job done.

Re: NI LabVIEW CLI won't start LabVIEW VI Server fast enough

Oli_Wachno — Fri, 15 May 2020 06:04:06 GMT

I have talked to some guys from NI some time ago.... the statement was: take James' tool, it seems to work better.

Re: NI LabVIEW CLI won't start LabVIEW VI Server fast enough

AgentAstronaut — Mon, 05 Oct 2020 20:36:24 GMT

I have used LabVIEW CLI with azdo and Jenkins and have run into this issue in both cases. Sometimes the solutions in the forum do not work, or the timeout is simply too long to deal with. My solution has been to call LabVIEW.exe prior to calling the CLI. For instance, in AzDo I store the version of LabVIEW I am using for my build as a variable $(lvVersion) then use it to call LabVIEW at the location of the LabVIEW executable.

steps: - task: PowerShell@2 displayName: "Open LabVIEW" inputs: targetType: 'inline' script: Start-process -FilePath "C:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW $(lvVersion)\LabVIEW.exe"

Then I call the LabVIEW build spec through the CLI:

- task: PowerShell@2 displayName: "Execute LabVIEW Build Spec" inputs: targetType: 'inline' script: LabVIEWPath "C:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW $(lvVersion)\LabVIEW.exe"

Your Mileage May Vary