When I try and create an installer it claims that three of the required run time installers do not exist on my system. It is requesting the 8.5 Run-Time, DAQ-mx 8.6 and Sound Vibration Run-Time. Additionally I know I also need the TDMS installer as well. But my list of "Additional Installers" does not seem to be filling out properly. It only contains the LabVIEW 8.0.1 Run-Time Engine, LabVIEW 8.2.1 Run-Time Engine and LabWindows CVI 8.1 Run-Time Engine. I know I should have more and a quick look in the ProductCache folder shows the following directory listing with MSIs in all of the important ones that I checked.

Directory of E:\Program Files\National Instruments\Shared\ProductCache
CVIRTE [8.1.1]
lv80rte
mkl700
NI Certificates Deployment Support [1.01.49153]
NI LabVIEW RealTime NB-FIFO [8.2.1]
NI LabVIEW RealTime NB-FIFO [8.5.0]
NI LabVIEW Rutime Engine [8.2.1]
NI LabVIEW Rutime Engine [8.5]
NI License Manager [3.2.1027]
NI Logos XT [4.9.0]
NI Logos [4.9.0]
NI MDF Support [2.51.87]
NI Service Locator [8.5]
NI Sound and Vibration [6.0]
NI TDMS [1.1.0]
NI Uninstaller [2.51.87]
NI USI UFF58 Plugin [2.2]

Even a look at the "Software" section of MAX shows that I have the LabVIEW Run-Time 8.5.0 installed. Any thoughts on how Installer gets its list of installed components? I'm not real interested in doing another full install of LabVIEW DAQ-mx, SV Tools, and DIAdem just to get my installer to recognize them.

In retrospec, this question would probably be better to ask on the NI forums since an engineer there might know the internal workings. So I have posted it there as well.

The Additional Installers list is built from files found in C:\Program Files\National Instruments\Shared\MDF\Manifests. The xml files there represent the additional installers and their dependencies.

The fact that your Additional Installers page is missing some installers, like the LabVIEW 8.5 RTE, would suggest that the files representing those installers are not present. But since you found those installers in the ProductCache folder, I'd expect there to be a file in the \Manifest folder as well.

I recommend going to Add\Remove Programs> National Instruments Software, then select all and press Repair.

-Bob



This post has been edited by bpreis: May 16 2008, 06:51 PM

Has anyone got a few spare minutes to add this to the LabVIEW Wiki? I'd do it myself, but I'm swamped at the moment...

I've seen the Additional Installers checkboxes get corrupted to the point where I had to uninstall all of my NI software and reinstall it to get it fixed. That sucks. So now I try to create a virtual build machine whenever I need to create an installer with additional installers included. The 'Additional Installers' feature would work much better if you could force it to point to a specific NI Installer file -- otherwise you can get stuck with it asking for 'Device Drivers May 2006' and you are pretty much SOL if you don't have that exact version (you can't just point it to May 2007, etc.

We're considering* an improvement to the Locate Distributions feature. The improvement we're considering might* work something like this: In the example of DCD May '06 vs. DCD May '07, if the system detects that the original distribution by which the part was installed is May '06, we will ask for that, but now the user will have an opportunity to tell us they don't have the original distribution, at which point we'll ask for an alternative distribution that 1) had been installed on the system at some point and 2) is known to contain the exact same missing part (which could be DCD May '07 in this example). You might* be able to try this feature if you're a beta member, possibly*.

*Use of safe language intentional so as to avoid volcanoes, earthquakes, and otherwise violent reactions from the gods.