Deployment Utility can't find files

Question

One of the standard search directories is “Current workspace directory”.
I’ve discovered that the Deployment Utility may or may not look there (regardless of whether it is checked), and it may or may not look in its subdirectories (regardless of whether “Search Subdirectories” is checked.
It works OK on some of our computers, but not on others.
In order to insure that the build always finds the files, I have to explicitly include in the search directories the folder that contains the .tsw file.
Is there a way to force the Deployment Utility to really look in the “Current workspace directory”?

Answer 1

The deployment utility will create a list of top-level files to deploy from a workspace, a directory or both. The distribution sources (workspace and directory) will only point to the root element which we will use to create the tree of files to include, these files will be specified with an absolute path to the file and we will not use the search directories to find them.
During the analysis phase the deployment utility will find all the required top-level files for the deployment. If you selected to deploy files from a workspace, the deployment utility will iterate over every worskpace object in the workspace and call GetAbsolutePath to get its path. If the problem you are seeing is with top-level files, then I would recommend calling into this method to verify that the files are found in the correct location.
Once we get all the absolute paths for the workspace objects we search those files, depending on their type. At this point things start getting a bit more complicated because of the large number of file types. If your workspace contains a sequence (we will find the path of the sequence by calling GetAbsolutePath on the workspace object, see the previous step), then we will analyze the sequence and for every step we will call the public API of its adapter to get the path; for example, for the LabVIEW adapter we will use VIPath and ProjectPath (in general, there are some special cases where we call other methods) to figure out which VI to deploy. If the problem is with one of your code modules I would recommend calling into the public path methods in the adapter that is calling into your code and making sure that the files are found in the correct location.
Without more information about your problem it is hard to give you a good answer, because the deployment utility (and test systems in general) are complicated pieces of code that deal with a great deal of complexity. Some of the things that might help us give you a more specific answer to your problem are:
What version of TestStand are you using?
What kind of deployment are you creating (VIs, DLLs, .Net assemblies? Creating Packed Libraries? Sending to multiple destinations?)?
Can you simplify the test case so that we can reproduce with relatively few files? Could you provide a sample that shows the error?
Are there any differences that you can think of between the computers where the deployment works and the computers where it doesn't?
When is the error happening? What is happening exactly? For example: Are you getting an error in TSDU that says that files couldn't be found? Are you building the deployment and the files don't show up in the image directory? 
I hope this helps.
- Francisco