LabVIEW
UI Elements Being Mangled by App Builder in Jenkins
Hello forums,
I'm posting this issue as I've came across it a few times and I'm sure other developers have found better ways of fixing it.
We came across an issue recently with our Jenkins build pipeline: our UI elements were being 'mangled' during automated builds (LabVIEWCLI + Jenkins). It's important to note that this issue doesn't crop up when we build manually directly from the IDE on the Jenkins machine, or when we build manually by triggering the build from a powershell window via LabVIEWCLI.
Image above showing the issue: text inside the controls is shifted off-center when built from Jenkins.
I was able to isolate the issue to the Jenkins process and after some troubleshooting (and forum searching) figured that the issue only cropped up when the process was run in the background. See this relevant StackOverflow post.
My current 'fix' (read: hack) is to run the Jenkins build-agent process in the foreground using the method outlined here: (1) set the build-agent to autologon to an account (2) connect to the Jenkins server using a scheduled task to run from the foreground (java -jar agent.jar -jnlpUrl). This causes all jenkins tasks to be run from the foreground which fixes the issue.
While this fixes the issue for now it greatly limits us. (1) Prevents us from connecting to Jenkins securely via SSH - all of our other repos use this method (2) prevents us from 'containerizing' our Jenkins pipeline - I would like to run the whole process in a docker container in the future.
So I'm putting the question out there to the forums: does anyone know other fixes and/or workarounds to this issue? Does LabVIEW application builder require the desktop, is this a hard requirement?
Thanks!
Paul
