LabVIEW

cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Auto-populating folders in an installer to a non-default folder

Hi All,

 

Currently I'm trying to make an installer for our system (developed in LabView+TestStand). Apart from LV and TS files the software usses a massive amount of other files; in order to deploy them easily on the target machine I want to include all of them, together with their hierarchy, as auto-populating folders. Seem fine.

 

Then a prepare the installer, we need three folders:

 

C:\Foo - this is the main installer for our stuff (TS Sequence, main lvlibp, some config files) and this one is the default instalation path.

C:\Foo_tools - this is an massive folder with around 16k files and I-don't-even-want-to-know how many folders in the hierarchy. 

C:\Foo_legacy - this is some additional tools folder, that we need due to "historical reasons". Fairly simple structure, 5 files 2 folders.

 

So my problem is that I have an auto-populating folder for Foo_tools (or actually three folders: Foo_tools/something1, Foo_tools/something2 and Foo_tools/something3) that I just want to put there. But I can't, as it seems that you can put the auto-populating folders only into the default folder, not anywhere you want. What should I do? I see two possible ways:

 

  1. make the C:\ default and kindly as the user to change it to C:\Foo
  2. install the tools in e.g. C:\Foo\tools and then make a *.BAT script to move the files to the proper place.

If you have any better ideas I would be glad. Maybe there is some other possibility that I have overlooked or some setting in LV Installer Builder that I'm unaware of.

0 Kudos
Message 1 of 4
(2,472 Views)

Honestly i dislike autopopulating folders.

I recommend you to use the TS Deployment Utility as i consider it superior to LV AppBuilder regarding building installers. It enables you to include folders into the build process.

Norbert
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CEO: What exactly is stopping us from doing this?
Expert: Geometry
Marketing Manager: Just ignore it.
0 Kudos
Message 2 of 4
(2,435 Views)

Thank you Norbert for that suggestion but I prefer not to use any external software for that, as if I do it has to be used by all people in the team, and this makes things a bit more complicated. I'll stick with the LV AppBuilder.

 

For now I'm just using zip files with the whole hierarchy that I unzip after the installation. It works but is far from beaing 'neat' for my taste.

0 Kudos
Message 3 of 4
(2,423 Views)

Okay, I've started with a different approach - as the lvproj is an XML file it should be possible to edit it manually. For now I'm able to read the whole thing and I see the folder tree, that I've configured (manually Smiley Mad) in the Installer.

 

The only problem that I see is that i don't know how to henerate the tags for the folders - they look like so:  {C63B6F86-C439-4240-9AAE-EC6A9DDD0A29} - any ideas how it is generated?

0 Kudos
Message 4 of 4
(2,418 Views)