Crystal Report

[KiranVSutar]

Hi Members,

We have an application developed in Visual Basic6, MSAccess(Datastorage) and Crystal Reports11 (for reporting), and working fine since years.

Now, we have developed the same application using Labview 7.1.

We are using Crystal Reports Ver.11 for report generation, and working fine. (Had to do this because we have invested a lot of $ for Crystal Reports.)

Now we want to distribute the software to our customers by giving them the setup. We are sucessfully able to generate the setup of Labview application and working fine on the customer PC, but it gives problems when generting reports on the customer's PC. We studied the documentation of Crystal reports, and found that they have Merge modules that needs to be included in the Setup. We have done it sucessfully in VB6, using MS-Installer, because they support including .MSM files directly.

We would like to know, how we can include those .MSM files of crystal reports in Labview Application builder,

or

how to include these .MSM files into our setup cd that is to be given to our customer.

Thanking you,

with best regards from,

Kiran V Sutar

Mumbai, INDIA.

[ejensen]

You should be able to add the files to your installer under 'Source Files' in the build properties. I'm not familiar with .MSM files specifically, but if you need to register them or run them in some way during the install, you can use the 'Run executable after installation' option under 'Advanced' on build properties. I often include a .bat file here to register any necessary files after installation.

[KiranVSutar]

QUOTE (ejensen @ Feb 23 2009, 10:51 PM)

You should be able to add the files to your installer under 'Source Files' in the build properties. I'm not familiar with .MSM files specifically, but if you need to register them or run them in some way during the install, you can use the 'Run executable after installation' option under 'Advanced' on build properties. I often include a .bat file here to register any necessary files after installation.

Thanks ejensen,

  When you make an installation setup, you have to include the dll, ocx, etc. files in your setup (MSI File). The number of dll(ocx,etc) files to be included depends upon the software, and the functions in that software that you have used. This is a very time consuming process and a tedious one, hence software manufacturers such as Business Objects (Makers of Crystal Reports), gives the MSM Files that includes all the necessary information for including the dll files. So the MSM Files must not be included in the setup, nor they are to be executed. But they provide the information to the InstallerMaker software about the dll,ocx, files.

The installer software must be able to interpret this information from the MSM file and include all the necessary files without the manual intervention of the developer to include those files.

Thanks,

with best regards from,

Kiran V Sutar

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

QUOTE (ejensen @ Feb 23 2009, 01:21 PM)

You should be able to add the files to your installer under 'Source Files' in the build properties. I'm not familiar with .MSM files specifically, but if you need to register them or run them in some way during the install, you can use the 'Run executable after installation' option under 'Advanced' on build properties. I often include a .bat file here to register any necessary files after installation.

Unfortunately that does not work for MSM files. They are simply MSI merge module and in fact the LabVIEW support files such as the Runtime Engine and many others that you can select in the Installer Tab are also provided as MSMs in the applibs\distkit\redist\modules (for LabVIEW 7.1). But the application Builder does not allow to add your own custom MSMs to the list of possible modules to merge into an installer.

The solution is actually to use the Application Builder only to Build your executable and then use some MSI Builder (Install Shield or similar) to create your installation from there. You can add the necessary MSMs from above mentionen directory to your MSI build if you do not need to go to complicated. lvruntime.msm would be the obvious module to include into a MSI Build to add installation of the LabVIEW Runtime Engine. It does depend on other modules from that directory but that should be handled by your MSI Builder automatically if it is good for anything.

You might also want to include the mkl.msm if you make use of any Advanced Analysis Library functions in your application.

Note: This is only valid for LabVIEW < 8.0. The LabVIEW 8.x Project Environment/Application Builder is a lot more involved and pulls in the modules from various places including "Program Files\National Instruments\Shared\ProductCache".

Rolf Kalbermatter

[KiranVSutar]

QUOTE (rolfk @ Feb 24 2009, 05:30 PM)

Unfortunately that does not work for MSM files. They are simply MSI merge module and in fact the LabVIEW support files such as the Runtime Engine and many others that you can select in the Installer Tab are also provided as MSMs in the applibs\distkit\redist\modules (for LabVIEW 7.1). But the application Builder does not allow to add your own custom MSMs to the list of possible modules to merge into an installer.

The solution is actually to use the Application Builder only to Build your executable and then use some MSI Builder (Install Shield or similar) to create your installation from there. You can add the necessary MSMs from above mentionen directory to your MSI build if you do not need to go to complicated. lvruntime.msm would be the obvious module to include into a MSI Build to add installation of the LabVIEW Runtime Engine. It does depend on other modules from that directory but that should be handled by your MSI Builder automatically if it is good for anything.

You might also want to include the mkl.msm if you make use of any Advanced Analysis Library functions in your application.

Note: This is only valid for LabVIEW < 8.0. The LabVIEW 8.x Project Environment/Application Builder is a lot more involved and pulls in the modules from various places including "Program Files\National Instruments\Shared\ProductCache".

Rolf Kalbermatter

Thanks Rolf (your Avataar does really reflect the amount of knowledge..keep it up),

Many thanks for your reply. I have already created and new installer using VB6-MSI that has only the Crystal Reports MSM Files. And it has worked. The only problem is, the end-user will have to run 2 Setup Files: 1.MyLabviewApplicationSetup, and 2.Reporting.MSI. I was just wondering if there is a way by which I can generate one single MSI File out of these 2 MSI Files. Of course, I am going to give the BatchFile as an immediate solution, but, is there something better than this?

Bye,

Thanks,

With best regards from,

Kiran V Sutar, Mumbai, INDIA.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

QUOTE (KiranVSutar @ Feb 25 2009, 05:04 AM)

Thanks Rolf (your Avataar does really reflect the amount of knowledge..keep it up),

Many thanks for your reply. I have already created and new installer using VB6-MSI that has only the Crystal Reports MSM Files. And it has worked. The only problem is, the end-user will have to run 2 Setup Files: 1.MyLabviewApplicationSetup, and 2.Reporting.MSI. I was just wondering if there is a way by which I can generate one single MSI File out of these 2 MSI Files. Of course, I am going to give the BatchFile as an immediate solution, but, is there something better than this?

As I tried to explain to you, you can use some other more flexible MSI Builder. Not sure if the VB6-MSI is that much more flexible than the LabVIEW Application Builder, otherwise you would need to get something like Install Shield or similar. Basically you use the Application Builder to create your executable with all the necessary support files and then add them to your install build script for whatever MSI Builder you use. If you want to make sure that the installer also takes care about installing the LabVIEW runtime engine you would also add the according MSMs as mentioned earlier.

This could however possibly cause troubles nevertheless if the custom MSM you want to add would rely on other modules such as the Visual C Runtime libraries that the LabVIEW modules might want to try to install too.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[ashwink27]

Hi Kiran,

I am Ashwin from Pune. can you send me the source code for using Crystal Report in Labview.

Thanks,

Best Regards,

ASHWIN

[kkluhana]

Dear Kiran

Can you please share your scrip with me, I am also looking some way to deploy my application which has

MS access , VB 6 , ADO , Crystal Report 10.

I tried Inno Script but its not working.

QUOTE (rolfk @ Feb 24 2009, 05:30 PM)

Thanks Rolf (your Avataar does really reflect the amount of knowledge..keep it up),

Many thanks for your reply. I have already created and new installer using VB6-MSI that has only the Crystal Reports MSM Files. And it has worked. The only problem is, the end-user will have to run 2 Setup Files: 1.MyLabviewApplicationSetup, and 2.Reporting.MSI. I was just wondering if there is a way by which I can generate one single MSI File out of these 2 MSI Files. Of course, I am going to give the BatchFile as an immediate solution, but, is there something better than this?

Bye,

Thanks,

With best regards from,

Kiran V Sutar, Mumbai, INDIA.