Tips and Tricks to build AF executable

[komorbela]

I am trying to build an executable from a fairly big project made of actors. I succeeded in the past, but nowadays I get a bunch of errors. Could you just give me (and collect these in one thread) advices, tips and tricks on building executables from AF projects?

Thanks in advance!

[dsavir]

Great idea!

The main problem I had was solved by the following tip:

Set "Show FP?" in Launch Actor to False. The run time environment doesn't launch the actor at all if show FP is TRUE.

A few more problems were solved by using a Debug Console (or monitored actor, or whatever you're comfortable with) to track when things close unexpectedly and why.

A third issue (that I'm not sure is only in Actors as such) is that if you have custom runtime menus of controls, save the runtime menus with the control and not as a separate file because the runtime envornment doesn't find them (even when they are in the same folder).

Hope this helps,

Danielle

[Ben_Phillips]

I don't think this is specific to AF, but remove all diagram disable structures that have broken or missing code in them.  That causes misleading errors, since they usually don't reference the actual part causing the problem.  I just occasionally search for all diagram disables in my project and remove old cruft.

[CaseyLamers1]

I would advise creating a blank project and add just your VI that you want to build. Let it pull all the dependencies. Build it there.

My projects are large and I had gotten crashes when the windows GDI Object limit of 10,000 was exceeded. I changed the registry to allow for a higher number. I am refactoring some code to call plug-ins from a source distribution.

http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/ED23C965B6F2BDA586257AB5007880F7

I also found a thread about loading of images:

http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/0D34B52E841EEB2F862578DA00627ED2

Casey

[testingHotAir]

All of my AF based projects use a plugin like architecture.  One problem I encountered when trying to build the exe was that it wouldn't find any plugins.  Turning off "Remove Unused Polymorphic VIs" helped, but in the end I had to manually assign destinations for each class.  I thought assigning destinations for the lvlibs would do it, but it didn't.

[fabric]

Not specific to AF, but for any large class-based project:

In the build spec under Additional Exclusions, I generally have "Remove unused members of project libraries" checked but "Modify project library file after removing unused members" definitely UNCHECKED. For certain projects this has been the only way* I could actually get a successful build. As an added bonus it also seems to speed up the build process a little

(* Well, the one other way is Advanced>Enable Debugging but that hardly qualifies as a successful build...)

[komorbela]

Thank you all for the useful tips! Actualy going through the project and setting all the "Show FP?" to FALSE helped me to make a build! I had to care about how to show these FPs. I tried first the simple "show front panel when called" option, and it just worked (On Windows Emedded platform). I probably had to have the "Modify project library file after removing unused members" UNCHECKED (as Fabric says). I remembered it form the past, so I didn't even want to try it without this setting (1 build takes 1 hour or so ).

All the other tips are useful, and I hope it will be a real good dissussion for anyone having problems with builds.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

I am really sorry it took this much effort to get you up and running... and I'm really glad you are up and running.