Deployment Of Custom UI And Sequence Files

[Lbee11]

Hi All,

I've been working on a customers program for a while now and it's now coming to the time where I want to deploy it and test on an external, fresh operating system in the runtime environment. I seem to be having some difficulties in deployment.

Firstly, a requirement of the customer is that they want to load sequence files on to an SD card, that is put in the front of a cRIO (the Data Acquisition Layer of the system). The test sequences are then pulled over WebDAV when selected by the custom GUI. All of this is working correctly in development and it runs great.

One of my questions is, do I need to do anything with the test sequences on the SD card, as in, they are simply development sequences at the moment (as in, made in the sequence editor and just saved to the SD card along with LabVIEW code modules), do they need to be "built" as runtime sequences? I have my adaptor for LabVIEW in "Runtime Engine" when saved etc, but I feel this is not enough.

I am currently deploying the custom GUI in LabVIEW's app builder but have issues with actually running the sequence, but again, feel like TestStand needs to be involved in this somewhere!

Any points in the right direction would be great, thanks

[~jiggawax~ · Accepted solution]

Deploying a TestStand system can be daunting.  The trick is getting all of the needed dependencies and getting them in the correct location.

The reason you need to build your VIs is so that they can suck in all the dependencies and relink so that they can then run with the LV RTE.  There are multiple ways to build the dependencies:

1. Use the TestStand Deployment Utility (TSDU).  This will create relative paths in your sequence file as well as a SupportVIs folder with all of the dependent VIs your VIs are calling.
2. Use LabVIEW to build all of your VIs into a Packed Project Library and then go through your sequence file and re-point all of the calls to the PPL.
3. Use the TSDU to build the PPL for you and it will automagically point your sequence to the VIs in the PPL.

In the future when they want to add sequence files but aren't adding dependencies they will need to point the sequence file's steps to the correct locations.

Remember that search directories are a huge part of TestStand.  If you don't use relative paths then you will need to find the dependencies via search directories.

Links on deployment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E04KPyWrEuo

http://www.ni.com/tutorial/9923/en/

I'm attaching a presentation I gave at NI Week on another way to deploy.

[Lbee11]

jigg,

Thank you for such a detailed answer! Would I be right in doing the following then:

1. Build my installer and GUI application in LabVIEW (as it does not rely on any sequences etc)
2. Use the TSDU to build my sequences and pack the code modules into a PPL
3. Move the built sequences to the SD card

I haven't done this many times at all and you are correct that it is daunting!

[~jiggawax~]

Yes that is correct.