Figure 1. Excelsior Packager
Packager user interface is built as a series of “pages”, each representing one logical step in the process of your installation package creation. As can be seen on the Figure 1. Excelsior Packager, most of page space is occupied by page-specific controls; but there are also some common controls: the sidebar at the left edge, the main menu at the top, and help/navigation buttons in the lower right corner.
You can navigate through the pages either sequentially, by using the Next Page / Previous Page buttons, or directly, by clicking the respective sidebar button or by selecting a page in the Page menu. Depending on the context, some pages may be unavailable, with their respective sidebar buttons and main menu items disabled.
Online help is available to assist you at any point. To display help information for the current page, click the Page Help button. To get a help on a particular control, click the Context Help button. The mouse cursor will change its shape to an arrow with a question-mark — click the control you wish to learn about, and the respective portion of the online help will be displayed.
The left part of Packager pages Files is occupied by the package files panel. The panel displays the installation package you are working on as a tree. Leaf nodes represent the files included in the package. Non-leaf nodes represent the directory structure of the installation. Top-level nodes represent abstract root directories. Root directory is a destination directory for the installation. The actual location of root directory in the end user’s file system becomes known only at install time. Root has a special symbolic name that starts with $, e.g. $(Root). A root directory may be referenced by its name from various places, such as command line arguments, shortcuts, etc.
An installation package contains one or more system nodes, such as the “Uninstall.exe”, added automatically by Packager. Only a restricted set of operations can be performed on system nodes.
In a complete installation package, directories and files have the respective icons displayed before their names. See also System files.
In an update package, the set of icons is richer:
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“new”: directories and files that were not present in the original package; they will be created and copied during installation of the update; |
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“updated”: directories and files that were present in the original package and will be changed during installation of the update, that is, directories containing new or changed files, and files that were changed and will be replaced during update installation. |
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“identical”: directories and files that were parts of the original package, but were not altered since the original package was created; they are not included into the update package; |
The following icon may also appear next to the name of a non-root node:
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“absent”: marks files that no longer exist or may not be used, and directories that contain such files |
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A thin red border surrounding a node icon indicates that the respective file or directory is “system”, i.e. was automatically added to the package by Packager. |
There are the following types of system files:
You may not remove any of the system files from the package.
The following buttons appear above the tree view of the installation package files:
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Create a new directory in the installation package. |
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Remove the selected node from the installation. |
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Rename the selected node. |
You may also control the view using the following checkboxe:
The Show full path check box can be used to show the locations of the files included into installation on your system.