Using Inno Setup with LV

[Dave_Thomson]

    I'm going to make the transition from the LV installer to using Inno Setup. I've found quite a few threads that discuss Inno Setup and indicate that plenty of people have used it with LabVIEW. I haven't found any "tutorials" or guides on it, though. Does anyone know if such a thing exists? For instance, I need to install DAQmx. The LV installer knows the relevant dependencies and where to find everything. My first guess is to create a fake LV installer, then note every dependency that it is installing, and make sure to include that in Inno Setup. Alternatively, one could use the LV installer to create an NI Drivers-only installer, and use Inno Setup to install your actual LV app as well as the LV Drivers Installer. I'm just hoping someone has documented how they've approached these issues already.

Thanks,
     DaveT

[Dave_Thomson]

After posting that, I remembered Wirebird's Deploy. I'm guessing this is pretty much exactly what I'm looking for, but I'm not sure it's supported any longer. It's still on the LV Tools Network, but Jack's webpage seems to not be up to full strength, and I think I heard rumors a while ago that Jack was moving on to other things. Does anyone know the status of Deploy?

[GrouchyMama]

I saw this a couple of days ago 

http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/211813 

[Hooovahh]

I use Inno Setup.  I also combine this with ISTool which is a program that helps walk you through the steps of an Inno Setup.  Starting with just a blank document is a bit confusing, but the ISTool has configuration dialogs that you specify things like source, what should be copied and how, and that generates the text file used to generate the installer.

As for your LabVIEW question.  I've seen it done a couple of ways but the easiest in my opinion is to make the fake NI installer.  So I may have my EXE installer (without RTE), then another installer that doesn't install any of my software, but includes all the NI dependencies in one go (DAQmx, XNet, VISA, etc).  Then I may have 3rd party installers that I'll include.  And for discussion lets say I have a TestStand deploy-able installer.  So I'll make an Inno setup that just installs all 4 of these installers one at a time, and then optionally copy some files or edit the registry if needed.  This method can produce an issue with the progress bar since it will only be updated after each of these 4 installers run, and the NI one might take a long time, so be sure and not hide that installer, but still call it silently.  Then the user has something to look at while the couple of GBs of NI stuff gets installed.  You could create one installer for DAQmx, one for XNet, one for VISA, etc.  But I worry there will be lots of duplicate stuff in each if it isn't done right.  For instance you might have the MAX installer in each of them when having it in one place is all that is needed.  I'm sure some versions of .Net will have lots of duplicates too.

Jacks old post didn't have a lot of information but was useful.  Too bad the wayback machine didn't have it.  It just talked about how you can look at an NI installer, and find the multiple individual pieces in it, then using process of elimination figure out what ones are critical to your application by testing it on a fresh machine (or VM) and then getting the list of minimum installers needed to make your application work, then include only those.  The problem with this in practice is there are probably about 100 or so NI installers embedded in my application's single NI installer, and performing trial and error to see which ones are needed, can be very time consuming.

[Dave_Thomson]

Thanks for the info and ideas. So far, I ended up doing pretty much what you suggested - which is to use LV to create one or two installers, and then use Inno Setup to bundle them up and do some extra file copying, etc.

It would be interesting to know if anyone had figured out a better way to have Inno Setup do the whole thing, though - e.g. install all the needed dependencies of all the needed NI drivers and such.