Collecting stdout from LabVIEW when run from Jenkins

[Rob Calhoun]

Hi LAVA-ers,

I'm finally implementing a long-delayed transition from our homebrew LabView build system to Jenkins.

The best build-step option (for Jenkins under Windows) seems to be "Execute Windows batch command". My batch command looks like this:

pushd "directory-containing-lvproj"
echo "Running LabVIEW build process..."
start "bogustitle" /wait "C:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 2017\LabVIEW.exe" "Build.lvproj" "BuildJenkinsProject.vi"
echo "complete, errorlevel %ERRORLEVEL%"
popd

where BuildJenkinsProject.vi is set to run when opened. BuildJenkinsProject.vi reads some environment variables set by Jenkins, sets up the builds (multiple EXEs and installers defined in a different lvproj) builds away.

But my builds take a while, and I'd like to see the output from my logging system inside Jenkins while the build is in progress. Some Googling turned up these posts re: sending output to stdout from LabVIEW:

https://lavag.org/topic/13486-printing-to-the-standard-output/

https://lavag.org/topic/11719-running-a-labview-exe-from-the-console/

I'm running LV 2017 64-bit, and none of the existing examples were handling 64-bit HANDLEs correctly, so I wrote a new version. This version uses only WinAPI calls (vs WinAPI + .NET), fixes some bugs, and it stateless, so you can call it anywhere in your code. Even when flushing the buffer after every write (which some on the Internet claim is necessary to get real-time log output; I am skeptical) it is plenty fast, around 10,000 lines per second. Since jdunham had previous written a fancy object-oriented logging system, I subclassed our logging system to write to stdout as well as the regular log. When I build from cmd.exe using the above batch file, it all works as intended.

My problem: when Jenkins runs my batch file, I get something rather less exciting: nothing!

E:\Jenkins\workspace>labview\Build\BuildJenkinsProject.bat
E:\Jenkins\workspace>pushd "labview\Source\Build\" 
E:\Jenkins\workspace\labview\Source\Build>echo "Running LabVIEW build process..." 
"Running LabVIEW build process..."
E:\Jenkins\workspace\labview\Source\Build>start "bogustitle" /wait "C:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 2017\LabVIEW.exe" "Build.lvproj" "BuildJenkinsProject.vi" 
E:\Jenkins\workspace\labview\Source\Build>echo "complete, errorlevel 0" 
"complete, errorlevel 0"

Not a big deal since I have my regular log files, but having gotten this far it would be nice for Jenkins to show work-in-progress. Any ideas? In the meantime, here is a stdout writer. (Released under MIT License, copy away.)

-Rob Calhoun

Attached: stdout writer function for LabVIEW 2017, and save-as-previous to LabVIEW 2012.

WinAPI Write to StdOut Folder.zip

 

Edited November 21, 2017 by Rob Calhoun
remove giant black bar

[Joseph Gorse]

I tried briefly and failed to get this to work for reading the console of a stdio printf("hello world\n") DLL using ReadFile. Has anyone else used it in this way?

stdout_test.zip

stdout_test_dll.zip

Edited November 20, 2018 by Joseph Gorse
hello world dll

[candidus]

On 11/21/2017 at 10:23 PM, Rob Calhoun said:

My problem: when Jenkins runs my batch file, I get something rather less exciting: nothing!

Maybe Jenkins reads StdErr instead of StdOut. Try to change the argument of DuplicateHandle() to StdErr (-12). Just a guess, I didn't try that myself.