Is the JKI State Machine VI (above) available?

Jim

Wow, it sounds like you’ve got a great system set up!

We’ve recently hit some pain points while building complicated installers using NI’s builder. It turns out it’s not always enough to just have the right code from SVN and the right reuse libraries installed — the installer builder wants junk from God-knows-which platform DVDs. It can make building installers on more than one machine an adventure, to say the least.

Because of that, we’re looking at ways to solve the problem with a dedicated build system, as well. You can be sure we’ll blog about it, if only because it means bragging about sweet hardware.

Justin

This might not seem like it but this is a very important blog and most people won’t recognize the importance. I have spent the last 14 or so years building executables. Automatic building is the one of the best things to happen. The real question for everyone is how to use it to your benefit.

At Meikle Automation we have been using a semi automatic builder since 2000, when I started. Once I found out that full automation was possible we created a fully automated builder. We automatically edit the project file to modify the build number. It runs every day whenever a developer needs a new executable.

We do a few things a bit differently as we have a single software product for all project. We have a dedicated PC for building exe’s and compiling FPGA code. We access it through logmein, so we don’t need to be in the office to build a new version. We automatically update from svn. Our software builder includes all previous projects so old projects can be updated to the latest version. We have error reporting when a single VI breaks the build and success reporting when a build is complete. Those get emailed to the software team. We include things like build number, a html link to the ftp site it resides on and an extra message so other developers can know if they can to ignore this build or not. This is most useful when we have several people in the field and 1 person in the office fixing the code.

The latest revision of our builder includes the creating an installer. This executes a few scripts that builds an installer. We have several other 3rd party installers that are required and NI doesn’t provide a nice way to build them into an installer

The unfortunate side is we don’t have the excuse of “I am waiting for my code to compile” anymore.

Dean

That’s a great point A solution that I use is to have build.vi edit the XML of the project file directly to increment the build number (or set it to whatever I want) and then save the .lvproj. The only wrinkle is that this requires starting out with the project file closed. After the edits are done, build.vi opens the project file and runs the build script(s). This technique is on my list of “possible things to blog about,” so I’m glad you brought it up.

Justin

Using auto-numbering is not very convenient. For an exe this is OK, but I can’t control it and have to rely on LabVIEW, and I can’t get the info available.

Ton