Modifying the Hierarchy of an Standalone Application's Directory in LabVIEW

Updated Dec 2, 2023

Environment

Software

  • LabVIEW
  • LabVIEW Application Builder Module

This article will show an approach on how to change the directories, add, remove folders, and include files into different hierarchy levels of a stand-alone application (Executable) in LabVIEW. 

In order to modify the hierarchy of the application, we are going to use an example with its proper documentation file, SubVis, and the main VI. 
 
  1. Organize the Project Items of your Project Explorer window. In this step, the main idea is to use the built-in functions in LabVIEW, for example, the virtual folder option in order to separate dependencies, documentation, among others. Take a look at our example:
 
proex.png
 
       2. Configure the Built Specification section 'Source Files'
 
sourcefiles.png
 
      3. Configure the Build Specifications section 'Destinations'. In this section, you can add other folders besides the 'Support Directory'. In our case, we created the 'Documentation' folder to include the Readme file.
Destinations.png 
     
      4. Configure the Build Specification section 'Source Files Settings'. For example, here we are going to manually link our 'Docs' virtual folder of our project in LabVIEW to the 'Documentation' directory of the Built specification. 

Sourfilese.png

       5. Check the Preview section to verify that your directories have been created successfully and autopopulated. 

preview.png
 

After following these steps, the end-user should be able to build his application and check the hierarchy of the application files on the specified directory.