open LV via Application reference

[petit_spirou]

Hi to everybody,

I am about to experiement a little about with application references.

I read that it is possible, to start applications or Frontpanels of VIs.

So I tried to do the same as with the VIPM:

calling the LV-IDE to do a masscompile with some VIs I have.

On my testcomputer I have a few LV-Version installed.

Out of LV11 I wanted to start LV 8.5 to do a masscompile.

But I failed doing so.

Is there a secred on how VIPM do calling the different LV-Versions via a Port-ID

or can somebody explain me how to program such a task?

Greetings

Spirou

[Antoine Chalons]

Sorry I'm a bit short in time so I'm only going to give you a few links :

- LabVIEW Tray Launcher : is a n app (built in LabVIEW that lets you launch any LabVIEW version that's on you computer

- JKI Fast Mass Compile : a mass compile utility that's faster than NI's

These links should help you with your project, good luck!

[Aristos Queue]

Antoine: That JKI mass compile tool... I never saw it before. It is described as being for LV 8.0. There were a lot of issues in LV 8.0. Is that tool still relevant at LV 2012? Has the built-in mass compile come up to speed with the JKI tool? Or is there still a difference?

[Antoine Chalons]

Good questions... I don't know the answers.

I can't edit my previous post, you're right, I should have described it differently.

I personally don't use the JKI Fast Mass Compile Tool but I know it exists and I thought it could help petit_spirou.

Edited November 12, 2012 by Antoine Châlons

[JamesMc86]

I don't know exactly how VIPM deals with this but there are two external interfaces to VI server, either TCP or activeX. My thought is they would have to use activeX to be able to actually launch the application, but this would be Windows only.

Of course there maybe something I'm missing, you could also launch LabVIEW using system exec, but you would not be able to control it through this.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

I don't know exactly how VIPM deals with this but there are two external interfaces to VI server, either TCP or activeX. My thought is they would have to use activeX to be able to actually launch the application, but this would be Windows only.

Of course there maybe something I'm missing, you could also launch LabVIEW using system exec, but you would not be able to control it through this.

While ActiveX has the feature to also launch the application server there is no reason why you can't use the TCP/IP interface, and I'm pretty sure they do that for multiplatform reasons. You simply have to first launch the executable with System Exec yourself.

The entire VIPM stuff is likely a bit involved and complicated, enumerating the installed LabVIEW versions from the registry, finding their install path, reading (and possibly manipulating) the according LabVIEW.ini file to find out the TCP/IP server properties and then trying to connect to it and in case of failure start it with System Exec and try again to connect.

But it's all doable although the details about timeouts to use when trying to connect can be a lot of trial and error.