Select Source Dialog Prompt When Building an Installer

Issue Details

When trying to build an installer in LabVIEW or LabWindows/CVI, I get the message:

Some installers you selected for this build are not available on this computer. The preselected media below contain the required installers.
 
Why am I getting this dialog prompt, and how do I include these additional installers in my build?

Solution

The solution to these dependency errors depends on how the software included in the installer was originally downloaded: 

• If the additional installer has been downloaded from ni.com/downloads and the source has been deleted, it will be necessary to download the same version and unzip it again before the build, and point the Installer source location field to this new folder.
  • Point the Select Source dialog to the directory in which setup.exe was extracted. For IVI drivers and self-extracting executables (.exe), the WinZip Self-Extractor extracts files to C:\National Instruments Downloads\. If the download came as a .zip file, extract the files, then point it to where the extracted setup.exe is located.
• If additional installer has been installed from a CD or USB, it will be necessary to put CD or USB into the drive before building the installer.
• If it has been installed from a network location, make sure the access to the files on the network drive or one of the two above options is still possible.
• If the software on the PC was installed from a LabVIEW-built installer, the "Select Source" dialog may reference that LabVIEW-built installer. It will be necessary to point to that installer to get this dialog box to not come up anymore. 
  • If that doesn't work, repair or force reinstall the same software stack as the computer that built the original installer to have fresh installs of the software with the setup files. 
  • It is also possible to upgrade to a newer version of the software by downloading it from the NI website. 

When it comes to building an installer in LabVIEW, make sure the following settings are selected to avoid this dialog box in the future:

LabVIEW 2013 or Newer

Selecting the Copy all future installers to this computer when you run them checkbox will cause all future installers run on the system to automatically copy their products into the local cache during the install. This will prevent from future prompts for the location of those installers from within the Installer Builder utility.

LabVIEW 8.6 or Older

In order to avoid the notifications in a version of LabVIEW 8.6 or older, it will be necessary to manually copy the entire contents of a source installer to the hard drive. In the case of NI-DAQmx, that means copying the entire contents of the Device Driver CDs to the hard drive. Then next time an installer is built, change the Installer Source Location in the Advanced Installers dialog box to the location where the contents of the Device Driver CD have been copied to.

Additional Information

LabVIEW:

In LabVIEW versions 8.6 and later, the Installer Source Location field is not editable as described in the LabVIEW 8.6 Upgrade Notes. If the source is not found at this location, there will be a prompt for a correct location during the build process.

LabVIEW requires the additional installer’s source MSI and .id files that were used for installation on the development machine to be able to install the additional installer on other machines. These source files are not usually left on the development machine after installation. The Installer source location field tells LabVIEW where to find these needed source files. LabVIEW will, by default, set this field to the last location used to install the additional installer on the development machine. This should be the root directory of the location from where product has been installed, usually on a CD or network drive.

Some of these shared installer dependencies may have had a new version installed by another NI product and that product will be required in order to build the installer. Later Measurement Studio 8.0 is installed, which installs an newer version of NI MAX (4.1) and overwrites the previous version of NI MAX (4.0) (note: the version numbers of MAX are just an example and don't reflect real revisions shipped with various products). Now, NI-DAQmx 8.0 depends on Measurement Studio, and when
an installer that includes NI-DAQmx 8.0 is built, it will need to copy the Measurement Studio installer from the distribution that installed it. So while Measurement Studio is not directly being included, a shared dependency that it updated is being included, and the Application Builder needs to copy the installer of that dependency.
 
LabWindows/CVI: 

To stop the notification in new versions of CVI, navigate the Distribution window to the desired files. For older ones, simply select the option that appears in the notification. These will copy, respectively, the source location to and source of the additional components to the hard drive. With that, the prompts will no longer appear.