Installing Files from external folder not linked into the installer

[d2_s]

I was wondering if it is possible to have my installer copy files from external folders to the destination directory instead of having all of the install files compressed into the exe itself?

For example I would have my installer app in location d:\setup.exe and a folder containing my installation files in location d:\setupFiles. The setup.exe would proceed to copy the files from d:\setupFiles to the destination machine. Is this possible?

Thanks

[d2_s]

Anyone know the answer to this? If I can get this installer working then I can actually advise my boss to purchase this application otherwise I'll have to look at some uglier options for setting up installations

[linder]

Hello,

Yes, you can do this. Please use the "Copy Local File(s)" script function.

Does this help?

[d2_s]

Hello,

Yes, you can do this. Please use the "Copy Local File(s)" script function.

Does this help?

Yes it does Thanyou very much for all of your help!

May I ask if I will manually have to take care of uninstall entries when using this command, or will the log file automiatically handle this for me?

I will test it out for myself anyway :)

Thanks Again!!!

[d2_s]

Ok, I noticed files copied via the copy local files command don't actually get added to the install log ... is it possible foe me to have these entries included on the install log automatically? Or do I need to make the entries into the install log manually?

A really nifty feature would be to allow the install file command to accept a source path other than then %_SB_INSTALLDIR% that allows me to enter paths that don't neccesarily exist yet. I know it's not that useful for most installations but in cases where you know details of the target machine in advance this would be very useful.

[linder]

Hello,

We'll add an option to log "copy file" commands to one of the next builds, thank you.

You can use all available variables and hardcoded paths, not only %_SB_INSTALLDIR%.

Does this help?

[d2_s]

Hello,

We'll add an option to log "copy file" commands to one of the next builds, thank you.

You can use all available variables and hardcoded paths, not only %_SB_INSTALLDIR%.

Does this help?

Excellent, thankyou for all of your help. I can now do everything I need to do ... the only minor thing is being able to manage the progress bar now. I am copying across various files using a combination of the install fil and copy files commands and the only quirk now is that the progress bar doesn't update when I am performing copy file commands.

[linder]

Hello,

Just a quick idea: what you can do is to display a "Wait Dialog...".

Friedrich

[d2_s]

Hello,

Just a quick idea: what you can do is to display a "Wait Dialog...".

Friedrich

Sadly I wish I could do this but because the installer will be handled by non-technical people they need to see progress. The installs will be quite large and when they don't see progress the users tend to do things like turning off the machine etc. Not a big deal with my installer but it will prevent unneccesary technical support calls if I take the progress bar route :)

[linder]

Yes, I see. I'll see what we can do here.

Thanks,

[d2_s]

Yes, I see. I'll see what we can do here.

Thanks,

What would be useful, would be to be able to get access to a string list of file names from a specified directory path.

That way I could loop through the retreived files and calculate the total install size. Then as I loop through and use the copy files command to copy across the individually installed files I could update the progress bar manually as I am copying each file.

I am already doing this, the only problem is my file lists are currently hard-coded ... if I could dynamically process the files retreived from a folder (as specified above) it would make maintaining the code very easy and actually make the code very clean as I could use one piece of generic code for each of my install configurations.

The reason I asked about floating point arithmetic was because I am manually calculating the cumulative percentage value for the progress bar (based on the file sizes relative to the total install size).

I can get away with this using only integer arithemtic because the cases that will give me a zero result will generally have no affect on the progress bar anyway ... my installs consist of a small number of very large files and a small number of very very small files so though the very small files generate a 0 percentage resault it doesn't really matter.

---

One other way to get around the progress bar percentage calculations without adding integer arithmetic would be to allow the user to manually specify the upper value of the progress bar. For example I could set the upper value to say 4096000 and I and I would update the value by say 100000 for example, and the progress bar would automatically handle the percentage calculations thus eliminating the need to make percentage calculations with any floating point precision. :)

Thanks again for all your help.

P.S In addition it would be neat to also be able to manually set the Disk SPace Requirements et al in the "Ready to Install Dialog" ...

[linder]

Okay, thank you for the info. I'll see what we can do.

BTW, the %_SB_DISKSPACEREQ% variable holds the value for the required disk space.