Select Source Dialog Prompt When Building an Installer in LabVIEW

Issue Details

I have built an application in LabVIEW and now want to create an installer to distribute my application. I want to include other installers (NI LabVIEW Run-Time Engine, NI-VISA, NI-DAQmx, NI-MAX, etc.) with my LabVIEW application. I have left the "automatically select recommended installers" checked, but when I try to build my installer I get a message saying:

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 you downloaded the additional installer from ni.com/downloads and deleted the source, you will need to download the same version and unzip it again before you 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 your download came as a .zip file, point it to where the extracted media is located.
• If you installed your additional installer from a CD or USB, you will need to put that CD or USB into your drive before building your installer.
• If you installed from a network location, you will need to still have access to the files on the network drive or one of the two above options.
• If the software on the PC was installed from a LabVIEW-built installer, the "Select Source" dialog may reference that LabVIEW-built installer. You will have to point to that installer, force reinstall the same software stack as the computer that built the original installer, or upgrade your drivers to newer versions. Learn how to force reinstall your software here: Force Reinstall Non-Working or Corrupt NI Software.

Preventing this dialogue box in the future will depend on the settings you select when building the installer:

Building the installer with LabVIEW

In LabVIEW 2010 or newer, you can prevent this dialogue by selecting the following option of the Additional Installers window in the Installer Build Specifications.  For more information about what this check box will do, see LabVIEW 2011 Help: Additional Installers Page (Installer Properties Dialogue Box).
LabVIEW 2013 and newer: To minimize media prompts while building your installers, copy the selected installers and all future installers to this computer.​ LabVIEW 2010, 2011, 2012: Copy selected installers to this computer before building

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 you from ever seeing a prompt for the location of those installers from within the Installer Builder utility.   

In order to avoid the notifications in a version of LabVIEW 8.6 or older, you'll need to manually copy the entire contents of a source installer to your hard drive. In the case of NI-DAQmx, that means copying the entire contents of the Device Driver CDs to your hard drive. Then next time you build your installer, change the Installer Source Location in the Advanced Installers dialog box to the location where you copied the contents of the Device Driver CD. 
 

Building the installer with CVI
To stop the notification in new versions of CVI navigate the Distribution window to the desired files and the CVI will copy the source location to your hard drive so that you are no longer prompted in the future. To stop the notification in CVI simply select the option that appears in the notification. This will copy the source of the additional component to your hard drive and the notification will no longer appear. Building the installer with TestStand
TestStand automatically copies the installer files to your hard drive. When you try to build an installer, you'll be prompted only once for the source location. TestStand will then automatically copy the contents of the source location to your hard drive. Once you locate the source files, they will be copied to your hard drive, and you'll never be prompted for the source again.

Additional Information

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, you will be prompted 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 which you installed the product, 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 you decide to install Measurement Studio 8.0 which installs an newer version of MAX (4.1) and overwrites the previous version of 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 you build an installer that includes NI-DAQmx 8.0 it will need to copy the Measurement Studio installer from the distribution that installed it. So while you aren’t directly including Measurement Studio you are including a shared dependency that it updated, and the Application Builder needs to copy the installer of that dependency.