Questions on Application Builder

[dj143]

I have successfully used Application Builder several times to distribute executable applications and I have read through a variety of documents including “Distributing Applications with the LabVIEW Application Builder.”  However, I have a couple of questions.

1.  Under what circumstances do I need to rebuild the executable and under what circumstances do I need to rebuild the installer?  In other words, must I always need to rebuild both executable and installer when I make a change in the application?  I realize that making a “change” could mean anything, which may be hard to answer.  I’d like to have a better understanding of the relationship of the two builds and the final application.

2.  Related to the above question, why is there an option to define separate version numbers for the executable and installer? In other words, under what circumstances or scenario would the two versions be different?

3.  Is it possible to have the built application automatically look up the version number that was defined in either executable or installer and display it when it runs?  This would be nice to avoid me having to remember to update the application “About” display each time I rebuild the application.

4.  Is it possible to automatically rebuild both executable and installer without having to rebuild them individually?

I use Win XP and LV 8.5.

Thanks,

Dave

[smercurio_fc]

1) You need to rebuild the application whenever you feel it is necessary to rebuild the application to include whatever changes you made to the source code. Usually this is all the time, but there can be cases where you may be making changes to the source code that you're not ready to release. Others say that the executable should be rebuilt  whenever you make source code changes to make sure you haven't broken anything.

2) The executable and installer are two separate applications, so they would need to have different version numbers. The reason is that you want to be able to change the installer on its own. For example, let's say you have an applicaiton that uses DAQms, and you initially create an installer for your application that doesn't install DAQmx, and thus require that it be installed separately. You could come along later and say that you're going to include the DAQmx installer as part of the installation package. This changes the installer, and not the application you developed. Thus, to distinguish between the installer that doesn't include DAQmx and the one that does, you have two separate version numbers.

3) The "built application" and the "executable" are the same thing. The executable can't get the version number from the installer since it's a different application and thus would have a different version number.

4) I don't believe this is possible from the Project Explorer since they're two separate builds. You could probably create a VI that calls the "BuildTargetBuildSpecification" to do this, as mentioned in the LabVIEW Help.