Building Exe in LabVIEW 2019 Pro

[Dan Bookwalter N8DCJ]

If I build and exe using LabVIEW 2019 Pro , that utilizes the report generation toolkit , can it be run on a PC with just the LabVIEW runtime engine , and , some of these PC's may have LabVIEW 2019 Full installed on them. Will it run in that case ?

Regards

Dan

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

11 hours ago, Dan Bookwalter N8DCJ said:

If I build and exe using LabVIEW 2019 Pro , that utilizes the report generation toolkit , can it be run on a PC with just the LabVIEW runtime engine , and , some of these PC's may have LabVIEW 2019 Full installed on them. Will it run in that case ?

Regards

Dan

It should. The Report Generation Toolkit VIs are either built in (HTML Report) or access the according Word or Excel Active X component. However the Office ActiveX component is version sensitive. LabVIEW uses dynamic dispatch to access these interfaces, but uses early binding for that. It means it determines the actual method IDs to call at compile time rather than at runtime based on the method name. This has as consequences that the calling is slightly faster but any version difference in the ActiveX interface leads the LabVIEW method call into the abyss. So your Office installation on the target machine has to use the same version as what was used on the machine on which you build the application. The change to use late binding would have been fairly trivial for anyone having access to the LabVIEW source code, but alas was never considered a strong enough issue to let a developer spend a few hours on it.

If I would have had to do it I would probably have left the early binding option in there and added an extra retry to try late binding at runtime if the initial methodID call would fail. Or even fancier, let the ActiveX method call have a menu option to select if it should do early binding, late binding or a combination of both with retry if the early bind call initially fails.

Edited May 29 by Rolf Kalbermatter

[LogMAN]

12 hours ago, Dan Bookwalter N8DCJ said:

can it be run on a PC with just the LabVIEW runtime engine

Yes.

12 hours ago, Dan Bookwalter N8DCJ said:

some of these PC's may have LabVIEW 2019 Full installed on them. Will it run in that case ?

Yes. It will still use the runtime engine, which is part of the installation.

Here is a KB article with more information on how to bundle different report classes with your executable: Create a Stand-Alone Application Including Report Generation VIs - NI

[Dan Bookwalter N8DCJ]

Rolf/Log

Thanks guys for the input , I will have to do a little testing , but , sounds encouraging.

Regards

Dan