Creating an installer in LabVIEW 18.0.1f4 (32-Bit) always looks for 2018 SP1 f5 RTE installer source

[Bryan]

I maintain several machines in our factory, all running various versions of LabVIEW executables.  One of the many versions I have installed on my machine is LabVIEW 2018 v18.0.1f4 (32-bit).  

It's been 'many moons' ago, but I remember updating my 2018 runtime to SP1 f5, but I haven't had to build an installer in 2018 since then.

I ran into a situation yesterday where I needed to create an installer in 2018 and left "Automatically select recommended installers" checked, which auto-selects the 2018 SP1 f5 RTE. 

When I select "OK" in "Additional Installers", the "Select Source" dialog appears with a single entry, which is a 2018 application that I had built and installed on my local machine.  Clicking on "OK" prompts for a media path as expected, but I don't have (or can find) and installer for 2018 SP1 f5.  Even pointing it to the installer it's referencing (that I created) gives me an error message stating that the "...media you have provided is a different version of the requested media" (which it isn't).

I ended up giving up on creating an installer in 2018 and recompiled everything in a later version of LabVIEW since I needed to get an update deployed immediately.  However, I am curious whether anyone has any insight into this.  I can't be the only one to have seen it.

Edited September 11, 2024 by Bryan

[Bryan]

Below is a snapshot of all of the RTE installers shown when I un-check "Automatically select recommended installers". 

As you can see, I do have the 2018 SP1 f4 (64-bit) RTE.  With that I am able to BUILD an installer, but I haven't checked to see if it would work properly on a target machine.  I don't have any 64-bit versions of the LabVIEW IDE installed.  I'll bet that this is the RTE installed with my install of VIPM (I'm using 2020)

 

Edited September 15, 2024 by Bryan
typos

[LogMAN]

I can confirm that LabVIEW 2018 SP1 f4 (32-bit) automatically selects LabVIEW Runtime 2018 SP1 f5 when "automatically select recommended installers" is checked and LabVIEW Runtime 2018 SP1 f5 is installed. Though, it does not ask for the installer source.

There used to be SFX installers that were extracted to "C:\National Instruments Downloads". When such an installer was used, the destination folder must not be deleted as it is used as a source location when creating installers in LabVIEW.

Perhaps you installed the runtime engine through an old SFX installer and deleted those files at some point?

[Bryan]

On 9/14/2024 at 10:58 AM, LogMAN said:

Perhaps you installed the runtime engine through an old SFX installer and deleted those files at some point?

Using an old SFX installer is likely the case.  I don't recall deleting anything, but my C:\National Instruments Downloads directory is empty.