How to include third party driver vi's into installer

[Sambaiah Gunakala]

Hi,

currently iam using some third party driver vi's in one of my application.

My question is during the time of creating installer how to include all those third party driver vi's in the main project.

Generally the default path for the driver vi's is "C:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 2010\instr.lib" and how to set this deafult path location for those driver vi's during the time of creating the installer.

Thanks and regards

Sambaiah Gunakala

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

Hi,

currently iam using some third party driver vi's in one of my application.

My question is during the time of creating installer how to include all those third party driver vi's in the main project.

Generally the default path for the driver vi's is "C:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 2010\instr.lib" and how to set this deafult path location for those driver vi's during the time of creating the installer.

Thanks and regards

Sambaiah Gunakala

What type of installer are you talking of? Is this an installer for a build app, or an installer for a development library?

In the first case you normally don't have anything like vi.lib etc anymore since all the necessary VIs are packaged into the executable anyhow.

In the second case you really should look into using VI Package Manager. This is the prefered way to distribute development libraries nowadays. Best would be probably to create a package for individual instrument drivers and create one or more other packages for your library and make them depend on the instrument driver packages. I find it troublesome to package everything into one big blob, if they are not very closely related to each other.

[ColinR]

Another solution is to direct the user to install the library as-supplied from the third party. While this may seem like another unnecessary step, this way the user gets the most updated version of the driver/library that the third party has to offer, and you don't have to continually update your installer when the manufacturer updates their drivers. It also reduces the probability that you will end up with two different versions of the vis on the host computer and have to sort out cross-referencing issues, which are always ugly. Dealing with different paths can also be problematic, so this technique allows the user to put the third-party library wherever they want, without you having to depend on a fixed path.

To mitigate the possibility of incompatibility with new releases of the drivers, you will need to stay abreast of changes and potentially introduce version detection and management within your code for the third-party library.

This solution also eliminates complications to do with bundling third-party software into your releases from an IP perspective.

Edited December 12, 2012 by ColinR