Application Builder should test for broken VIs *before* starting the build (or very early on in the process)

[Jim_Kring]

When building an application, the build will fail if any of the VIs are broken.  But, the build doesn't fail until very late in the build process.  It would be great if the build would fail right away if any VIs are broken.

Note: In one of our big applications, it sometimes takes 30 minutes into the build before the build fails.  However, it only takes a couple minutes to detect this by loading the VIs into memory and testing if they are broken.  So, as part of our one-click build, we implemented a pre-build test for broken VIs and abort the build -- this saves us a lot of time (in cases where the build is broken).

[RavensFan]

Let's fix that link http://blog.jkisoft.com/jki/can-you-build-your-application-in-one-click/.

[gmart]

In order to calculate linkage information correctly, all top-level and always included VIs are loaded into memory at the very beginning of the build process. So if a VI is broken, it will be caught. There are circumstances under which a VI may break during the build but isn't broken normally. Those are typically bugs and should be reported as such.

[Jim_Kring]

@gmart: Thanks for the info.  My complaint is not that the broken VI isn't caught, but when it's actually caught.  Also, the breakage exists prior to the build, and is not a result of the build process.  So, I'm just advocating that the check for broken VIs be done much earlier in the build process.

[PaulG.]

This would be even more useful it the app builder checked to see if any "always include" vi's were broken as well.