Tricky cRIO web services deployment

[Daklu]

Is there a way to build and deploy web services programmatically as a plug-in to a remote sbRIO?  

We have a working plug-in mechanism that uses source distributions for the plug-ins.  It's not clear to me if web services can be included in a source distritubtion build spec.  And then there's the whole question of what magic Labview does when deploying a web service.  We use TCP for communication, so in theory I think we should be able to deploy web services programmatically on the target itself--yet I haven't found any documentation explaining exactly what changes Labview makes to the target when a web service is deployed.

Anyone have insight into the best way to achieve this requirement?

[MajorTom]

Have you taken a look at the following community example?

Web Services in an RT Exectuable - LabVIEW Real-Time 2013

https://forums.ni.com/t5/Example-Code/Web-Services-in-an-RT-executable-using-LabVIEW-Real-Time/ta-p/...

[Daklu]

MajorTom,

That example doesn't really help us.  We're trying to deploy the web services as a source distribution, not as part of an rtexe.

Dave

[MilanR]

The following whitepaper may be close to what you are looking for: https://www.ni.com/en/support/documentation/supplemental/08/labview-web-services-faq.html#section-77...

"If the VIs, shared libraries, and data files contained in the .lvws file are complete and self-contained, the output file can be manually deployed (via FTP or copy) to any directory on the target machine as-is. Once the output file is manually deployed, it is automatically detected, unzipped, and installed by the NI System Web Server."

The quote is referring to the lvws file that is created during build of a web service (the lvws file looks like it is pretty much a zip file with a labview source distribution and configuration information for the LabVIEW Application Web Server). Unfortunately I am not sure what the "it is automatically detected, unzipped, and installed by the NI System Web Server" portion is referring to as I have not used this kind of manual deployment feature myself and that sounds kind of strange...

However the whitepaper does describe some caveats:

"Some Web service applications, however, require non-VI project items, such as Shared Variables and DAQ Channels. Due to how these non-VI project items are deployed, they cannot be built into the .lvws files. Instead, they must be deployed through the project."

So there are features you can be using in your project that might prevent you from using manual deployment altogether.