custom action dependencies not included in build

[RocketHacker]

i have custom actions in my build specification. these actions have dependencies that are not in vi.lib, nor in the package. when i install the package, it tries to find these dependencies. this leads me to believe that custom action dependencies are not included in the build? what should i do here? unpacking all dependencies to only include vi.lib code isn't a viable option.

 

secondly, and perhaps the scary part, when the package is installed and the dependencies are not found, labview will search for the VI. in my case, i have my main development directory set as a search path in labview, so the installer will actually find the file from its source location. if it pulls in the files not included in the package, we've completely lost configuration control! it seems to me that the installer should never search for VIs and just error out, but maybe that isn't an easy task?

 

 

 

[Michael Aivaliotis]

Custom action dependencies are not currently handled automatically in VIPM. If you want to have better control over this. I suggest creating a new package that contains the VIs required by your custom action. Then make this package a dependency of the package using the custom action. VIPM always installs dependencies first (bottom up approach). When your custom action is run, it will now be able to find the dependency VIs required since they were previously installed with the dependency package.

 

- "i have my main development directory set as a search path in labview"

I would recommend that you stop doing this, in general, and this has nothing to do with VIPM. You should not modify the default search paths in LabVIEW. LabVIEW already has a difficult problem with cross-linking behind your back. Adding your projects to the search just makes it worse and it's just bad practice to do this. If you find that you have to do this in order to make your project load properly then this is a sign that there are linking issues with your project tree. I would try to find the root cause and fix it there instead of changing the LabVIEW search path.

[RocketHacker]

sweet. i'll build my custom actions dependencies into a package and include that package in the build. any chance the "autodetect dependencies" option in the pro package could detect dependent packages in custom actions?? i know that at some point i'm going to forget to include the package.

 

you've got a really good point about the search paths. i'll have to reconsider. we originally added our dev directory to our search paths because it is very painful to relink things manually when files are renamed and it net'd a time savings. maybe we could just get better at naming things...