How to programmatically interact with stdin of an external executable

[michele.santucci]

I'm refactoring an old LabView application that uses an external exe to perform some test.
I'm using LabView 2013.

At the moment the external binary is launched trough System Exec VI but the user need to interact with the executable (is a command line application that collects input on stdin). I would like to avoid the user to interact with the executable to fully automate the process but this's not so simple since the user need to wait for some time before issuing the last command (say 10 seconds). And the only way to interact with executable stdin is to set System Exect VI to "wait until completion" but in such case I cannot 'wait' for a given time then insert the required input.
Is there any other way to iteract with an executable ?

I saw some older posts refering to OpenG piping features .. I have installed the latest OpenG release availabe but found nothing of this kind.. but maybe it was working only on linux platforms. 

[mcduff]

There is a JKI .NET System CMD package that may be useful. It is for 2015 or later, maybe it can be converted for you. 

[rolfk · Accepted solution]

The OpenG Pipe Library was never released as a package. But it is available in this post:

https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/Controlling-the-STDIN-STDOUT-of-a-legacy-application-in-LabVIEW/m-p...

Note that it contains only a 32-bit DLL, so won't work for 64-bit LabVIEW.

The actual source code can be found here if you are inclined to want to tinker with Visual Studio projects and C compiling and debugging:

https://sourceforge.net/p/opengtoolkit/svn/HEAD/tree/trunk/lvpipe/