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LabVIEW
System Configuation API for Configuration Management
Solved!
Hi all,
I've been toying around with the system configuration API for a little bit now and I see it as a great way for companies to use it as part of an overall configuration management utility. For example, if a customer wants to build up a new test rack with the same hardware aliases, configuration, and installed NI software then the system configuration API helps with most of this. I've already created a simple utility that can be used to query the currently installed hardware (of a local or remote system) and then programmatically rename the aliases based on a loaded configuration file or manual input. Likewise, the MAX export/import functionality can also be used. My application of this would primarily be non-RT and mostly PXI products but a good design could enable it to work for both.
So, my question to the community is actually on the side where I haven't used the System Configuration API yet which is querying the installed software on a system. The software querying functionality of the System Configuration API is really only geared towards RT targets and not Windows based controllers. I'd like to be able to export a list of installed software/drivers on an older system and then compare it with what is installed on a newer system to make it easier for customers to determine whether they have everything required. I know that the MAX export or report has a list of installed software but is parsing this the best way of retrieving installed software (It's a beast of a file)? Does anyone have a better method?
Regards,
Can you filter software. I thought it only supported filtering by a list of experts that was hardware related?
Right, but programmatically? I'm trying to create a LV based configuration management utility that could be distributed to multiple systems or used remotely. Any ideas for that? I haven't seen a way to do the custom reports in the VI's. The Filters that can be set up are only hardware oriented.
Thanks!
I'm also investigating using CMD commands to query things like the registry in order to get this information. Not sure if anyone has experience doing this at all. I've found ways to do both "reg query" and "wmic product get" in order to search for publisher/vendor of National Instruments but I haven't found an elegant way to format the output data so that it can be viewable in a file or LabVIEW. Any ideas on this? My Windows CMD command skills are a bit lacking for this kind of data parsing task 😉
-Tim
Not sure if the attached VI will work across various Windows OS's since it uses a powershell command and I also don't know how well the command used will work across 32/64 bit applications...But, so far this little VI I came up with is returning the software that I want to query. Hope this is usefull for others and, as always, suggestions for improvement are welcomed!
