I'm using 8.6 and am wondering if it is possible to transfer a Build specification from one project to another, or do I have to manually re-enter the Build specification in the "target" Project?

Thinking aloud: I wonder if you could just copy the build-related portion of the source lvproj xml file to the target lvproj xml file?

Yeah, I was wondering that too and, of course, that raises two questions/issues for me:

1. Has anybody done this successfully? (that's the oh my god I don't want to blow up the world or lose my project fear talking)
2. How do I know what the "build-related portion" of the lvproj is? (I know some XML but...)

Well I just tried doing a "cut and paste" of the build specs and got a "Project file corrupt" error message when trying to load it so I don't think this is going to work.

Well, I think it should be doable.. I've done it within the same project (I think it was in LV8, where there was no duplicate option yet).

You should make sure that that you copy the complete item <Item Name="YourBuildName" Type="EXE"> including the closing tag within the <Item Name="Build Specifications" Type="Build"> tag. Then inspect (and if necessary edit) all property tags of your buildspec to see if they relate to stuff that is actually in your project.

I've done the same with DAQ-Tasks in recent projects and it is really important that everything that is refered to is actually present in the project. It's also important that you don't introduce duplicate names/paths etc. by copying tags.

Hey Val - can you post your lvproj file? Maybe we could try to give you some pointers...

I'd be happy to do so but I can't seem to make an attachment work. Can someone point me to where there are some step by step instructions on how to do that?

What about attaching are you struggling with? Are you getting an error message?

Maybe LAVA doesn't accept *.lvproj files. Try zipping it and then attaching it instead.

I actually solved the problem by a back door process. I saved a top-level VI from one project (that didn't have the build specs I wanted) into the project that did have the build specs I wanted to use. A little bit of editing of the overall project to duplicate the virtual folder structure and I'm done.

I'll try the attachment process again so I can generate the error and post the exact error message. I'd really like to know how to do attachments and I suspect I'm just not following the correct procedure here for the forum.

Good stuff.

There is no built in mechanism to copy build specifications between projects. Since the build specification information is saved in the project file, you could perform a Save As on the project file which will copy the build spec information. One challenge with copying build spec info to another project is that files in the target project may be different than the source project. What would be the best way to handle that? Would the expectation be that the build spec should work or that the user would need to "fix it up"? In general, it is not desirable to create new items that are immediately "broken" so that has been a hurdle to having this feature available.

Yes, that I can understand. Perhaps one way to approach this conundrum would be to have a "Save As" function for Build specifications. That way a Build could be essentially "exported" to a an XML structure with a complete explicit pathname for each dependancy/resource then the newly created BLD could be integrated into an LVPROJ just like any legacy BLDs are.

You can access all the info on the build specifications via VI-server.

If you are smart you can copy the settings from one build to another (source distro's seem the most easy).

Ton