LabVIEW
Using VI Package manager behind corporate firewall
Good Morning,
I am trying to work out a system to use numerous LabVIEW toolkit libraries normally available using VI Package manager, but I am at a site with pretty strong corporate download policies and firewall preventing them from being downloaded to the individual developers' machines. I am trying to envision how I might have the IT folks download a number of the libraries to a common location so that they might be the core of the LabVIEW development group's toolkit. I'm trying to develop a common look and feel, but unlike some previous sites I have been at, the individual machines end up being configured, well, individually, with LabVIEW being installed, then any additional toolkits, drivers, etc.
Just looking for some input on how others have addressed this.
As always, Thanks! and hope to see you at NIWeek 2017!
If you have access to a VIPM Pro license, I think that the .vipc files do exactly what you want.
If you don't, then perhaps you can either provide a shared drive with all of the package files and instructions to just 'install all please' (but this allows missing packages, difficulty updating perhaps, some developers to not get round to it yet...), or maybe a zip file to extract into National Instruments/LabVIEWxxxx/{vi,user}.lib as appropriate?
Neither of these are likely to be what it seems like you really want, but if the problem is largely related to the firewall/download policies then maybe a set of packages and a script to install them in some order would work out?
On a computer that can access the Tools Network and has VIPM installed, go to the following path.
C:\ProgramData\JKI\VIPM\cache
There is where all the packages are stored temporarily. You can copy the files from there to a thumb drive, or burn to a CD or something to get them to your offline computer. Then VIPM can install them from that location instead of the internet.
Yet the pro version allows for making VIPC files which is a package of packages and you can include them inside the VIPC. Super handy for offline computers to just include all OpenG, MGI, reuse, and other tools network things in a single file that just gets installed by double clicking it. But for this, going to File >> Open Package File(s) and selecting all of them to install at once is just as easy.
Thanks! I will try and get a use case developed for my immediate manager here at this project, to then run by their IT Overlords. Not sure what toolkits are needed, it depends on how much complexity I can get them to adopt in their development. Their users are pretty much the original LabVIEW target audience, Engineers, Scientists and Technicians, just trying to write some fairly simple programs to acquire data, save it and then analyze it. They do make exe's for the actual end user, but there are a lot of hardwired constants, etc., and having shown them the MGI package's Write/Read anything utilities they are more ameniable to using ini files.
