Hello,
I have a problem with a system we're developing for one of our customers using TestStand 3.0 and LabView 7.0. Target systems use TS Base Deployment and LV RT 7.0.
Our customer has several products (about 15 or so) and we're running them all with the sequential model on several target systems. We have one development system and distributes the system with the Deployment Utility. Using the Deployment Utility worked great when our customer only had a few products but as more and more products were added to the same deployment it started taking a very long time to build the deployment package (1h+). This is not acceptable as we often have to update the software and rebuild the package; The change can take 10 minutes to make and then you have to wait 1h+ for the package to finish the build process. Updates are relatively frequent and if you accidently forget to update something you had to rebuild the package again. Our cusutomer also require an option to install older versions of test software for specific products only, while keeping the rest of the software intact.
The solution to the problem was to divide the package into multiple deployments instead of one and thus reducing the build time drastically (the updates never affect more than a few products at a time). I can however not get this to work perfectly. The idea is that to keep all common files (instrument drivers, top-level sequence file etc.) in one package called "Shell" and all configurations (Cfg-folder) in one package called "Runtime Configuration", the rest of the products each have their own package containing sequence files and VI's specific to that product. The Shell package also contains a modified model which executes the correct sequence file depending on what equipment is connected to the target system.
What's causing the problem is that the deployment utility modifies the custom types (the time stamp) that we have created for instrument control steps and since the product packages and the shell package (which contain the actual instrument VI's) are built at different times a type conflict will occur at runtime on the target machine. I have tricked the deployment utility to include all instrument VI's in the Shell deployment only because if we have to modify the instrument VI's you'll only have to install a new version of the Shell package. The model loads the types before the execution of the product sequence. When the model loads the product sequence I get the type conflict error. What I need is to prevent the deployment utility from modifying my custom types.
Perhaps I should take a whole different approach to solve the problem with a huge deployment package.
I hope I managed to explain my problem without causing too much confusion.
Regards,
fkarlsson
