This step is intended to describe the appearance and behavior of the resulting installer.
First of all, you should specify a company name, a product name and a product version. For that, use the respective entry fields from the Vendor information pane at the top. As you type the values, Packager automatically fills the default values for other settings such as the registry keys and installation directory which you may change later, if necessary.
In addition, the values entered in the fields Product Name and Product Version are used to compose the product identifier that will be displayed in the resulting installer.
By default Excelsior Delivery creates two keys in the system registry solely for managing the installation. One key is created to make the installed program appear in the Add/Remove Programs applet of the Windows Control Panel.
The other key is created to store the necessary information, such as the installation directory, that will be used by the installer when installing updates. According to the Windows programming guidelines, the default pathname of the key ends with SOFTWARE/company-name/product-name/product-version and the key is placed in the respective part of the system registry /The registry subtree HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or HKEY_CURRENT_USER is used depending on the Common or Personal installation type that the user selects during installation./ . You may change the tail of the pathname by entering another value in the Create registry key field.
If your application needs to create and manage additional registry keys on its own, you should extend the functionality of Excelsior Delivery by providing install/uninstall callback DLLs as described in section Extra facilities.
The installation wizard of Excelsior Delivery displays a dialog where the user selects an installation directory for the application. In Packager, you can specify a default value for the installation directory or force installation into a particular location not allowing the user to change it.
If you need to set a default installation directory, select the desired option from the Installation directory radiobutton group. The following options are available:
If you do not want the user to change the default directory when installing the application, uncheck the respective checkbox displayed below the entry field.
Click Ignore if you already have international characters in directory pathname.
Click Cancel to return to the Installation Settings page and correct the pathname so that it contains only ASCII characters.
On the Shortcuts tab you can specify shortcuts which the resulting installer will create on the desktop and in the Start Menu. There are five places where shortcuts can be created:
These options appear as the top-level nodes of the shortcut tree displayed on the left side of the tab.
You specify a new shortcut as follows.
 |
Add shortcut |
displayed to the left; or
Type the shortcut’s name and press Enter.
Select the file from the package for which you want to create the shortcut: click Select next to the Target field. A dialog showing the package files will display. Choose the file and click Ok.
By default, a shortcut reuses the icon of its target file, but you may change the icon. For that, select the shortcut in the shortcut tree, click Select next to the Icon field and choose the desired .ico file from the package.
You may also specify a working directory and command line arguments for the program that runs when the user clicks the shortcut. To do that, click Select next to the Start in field and select the required directory from the package. To specify arguments, type them in the Arguments entry field.
On the Installer appearance tab you can set the language of the installation wizard interface, the end-user license agreement that the installer will display, installation type that force the installer to install application for all or current user only, and a splash screen that the installer will show when unpacking and copying package files.
To set the language of the installation wizard, select the desired option from the Language combobox. Currently, English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Polish, and Russian are supported. The default value "Auto-detect" means automatic selection of the language at install time depending on the system locale settings.
To add the license agreement dialog to the resulting installer, type the full path to the desired text file in the License agreement field, or click Browse to select it using a conventional file dialog.
The license agreement must be a plain text file in either Unicode or ANSI encoding. You can set the encoding by selecting the respective radiobutton below the field.
You can select which type of installation better suits your needs from the Installation type combobox. The following options are available:
When performing a Per User installation the package must respect some rules:
If you want the resulting installer to display a splash screen when unpacking and copying package files, type full path to the desired bitmap image (.bmp file) in the Installation splash screen field or click Browse next to the field and select the image using a conventional file dialog.
The Branding button invokes the respective dialog that lets you further customize the installer and uninstaller, fitting them to the style of your application.
With the dialog, you can provide your own wordings, company and product logos to be shown during the installation process.
The branding information consists of three images, icon and several text strings. Using the dialog, you can replace all images and text messages with your own ones, and then easily test the appearance of the installer dialogs.
The are three images you can replace with your own ones:
You can specify your own bitmap (.bmp) files to be used, or leave these fields blank, so default images will be shown. If an image is larger than the recommended size, it is clipped, so its upper left part is shown. If an image is smaller than the recommended size, it is centered in the display area. Images are never scaled.
You can also specify your own Installer icon for installation process dialogs.
The branding dialog lets you edit the most important text messages — the window title, window caption, the welcome message and the feedback invitation.
The $(PRODUCT_NAME) macro
In every message, the string $(PRODUCT_NAME) is replaced by the product name you entered at the Vendor Information dialog.
Language
As of version 1.6, the Excelsior Delivery supports seven languages. Depending on the settings you specified at the Installer Appearance tab, the installer either detects the proper language automatically, or always sticks to the language of your choice.
The branding dialog lets you customize text messages for each supported language. Select the respective language from the combobox, edit the messages, and then proceed to the next language.
Note: There are other messages that Excelsior Delivery may show to the user. They are pure technical in nature, and they do not contain any company or product names.
Reset values
At any moment, you can reset the text messages to the default state, using the Reset button. It affects the messages for the currently chosen language only.
Bottom part of the dialog contains three preview buttons: Welcome, Main and UnInstall. Using them, you can quickly test the changes you have done to the installer images and messages. These buttons invoke the installer and show the respective installer dialogs exactly as they would look like on the end user’s machine, using the images, text messages and language you just selected.
Note: If you provided your own text messages for several languages, do not forget to preview the installer dialogs for each of them.
When you create an update package, the branding information of the original package is partially reused:
Welcome screen image, Dialog screen image and Window caption text remain the same as you specified in the original package. You can keep them unchanged or set new values.
Welcome screen caption and Welcome screen text are not reused, they are replaced with the default values provided by Excelsior. This is because the respective messages differ in the original and update packages — the former tells the user that new software will be installed, while the latter tells the user that already installed software will be updated.
So, if you have edited the respective messages in the original package, you should correct them in the update package as well.
Uninstaller screen image is not editable. As update packages can not be uninstalled by their own /Update packages are installed on top of a previously installed package. Uninstallation removes both the original package and all updates/ , you can not provide the uninstall dialog image.
On the File associations tab, you can specify a program that opens files of a certain type depending on the file name extension. The setting will take effect on the end user system after installing the package being prepared. For example, if you develop and distribute a program that works with files of some proprietary format, you can associate the file type with the program.
You set up a new file association as follows.
| |
Add association |
displayed to the left of the File name extensions pane; or
Type the extension name and press Enter.
Select the program that you want to associate with the file type: click Select next to the Associated program field. A dialog showing the package files will display. Choose the executable and click Ok.
Under the covers, the file association mechanism is quite simple. When the user double-clicks a file, the operating system recognizes the file type and invokes the associated program supplying the file name as a command line argument to the program.
In the Arguments field, that argument is shown as %1. If you need to specify additional arguments for the associated program, e.g. certain command line switches, type them in this field.
In the Description field, you may give a short description of the file type. The operating system will display it in some dialogs, such as File Properties. For example, the description of .mp3 files is "MP3 Format Sound".
In the pane To appear in the installer as, you tune the appearance of the installer dialog where the user is prompted to set file associations. In the dialog, each association is displayed on a separate line which includes a checkbox to enable/disable installing the association, followed by the text Associate *.ext files with program-description, where ext is the extension name you specified in the File name extensions pane.
In the entry field, type a short description of the associated program that the installer will display for program-description on the dialog. You may also set the default state of the checkbox that enables installing the association.
On the Post-install actions tab, you may specify:
The selected runnable files will be started one by one when the user presses the Finish button on the last dialog of the installation wizard. The runnable files are not shown in the installer dialog and are started always without prompting the user. It is a part of installation process.
These actions will be started when the execution of the runnable files will be complete.
You set up a post-install action as follows:
| |
Add action |
displayed to the left of the panel within the tab; or
A post-install action configuration dialog will appear.
Select the action type using the Type combobox. The following action types are available:
If you are specifying a Run, Run always or Open action, click Select next to the Target field. A dialog showing the package files will display. Choose the desired file and click Ok.
If you are specifying a Run or Run always action, you may also set:
In the pane To appear in the installer as, you tune the appearance of the installer dialog prompting the user to execute the post-install actions after finishing the installation process.
In the dialog, each action is displayed on a separate line which includes a checkbox to enable/disable the action, followed by the text you type in the entry field of the pane. If you ship a localized version of the installer, you may select the desired language in the combobox on the right and type the respective localized text that describes the action.
You may also set the default state of the checkbox that triggers the execution of each post-install action.
On the Extra facilities tab you can add your own callback DLLs that export functions which the installer will invoke before and after installation and uninstallation. These techniques enable you to add extra functionality to the resulting installer/uninstaller.
Another available facility is the invitation to leave feedback when your application being uninstalled.
Finally, on this tab you can select a integrity verification policy for installation package and a clean-up policy for installation folders upon uninstall.
If your product needs to accommodate to a specific target environment, you can use one of the following customization facilities:
To do that, click Browse next to the Install callback DLL and select the DLL using a conventional file dialog.
To do that, click Select next to the Uninstall callback DLL and select the DLL from the package files.
For more information on the programming of the callback DLLs see Callback DLLs.
If you want to remove the callback DLL invocation from the installation process, click on the corresponding text field and press the Delete key.
To enable this option, specify the web page URL or e-mail template in the Uninstall feedback URL field.
For example, to open feedback web page
http://www.compamy.com/feedback.html
to open client’s e-mail system
mailto:myname@gmail.com?subject=Feedback?body=...
The Test button next to the Uninstall feedback URL can be used to verify the URL.
You can customize the feedback invitation message in the Installer branding dialog.
To disable this option, uncheck the first box at the bottom of the Extra facilities tab.
By default, Excelsior unInstaller removes only the files copied to the installation folder(s) during installation.
You can configure the uninstaller to remove all files from the installation folders if, for example, your application creates some temporary files in the folders.
To enable this option, check the second box at the bottom of the Extra facilities tab.
When you create an update package, you can change the following settings:
You may also add new shortcuts to the files included in the update.
Other settings make no sense for updates, so the respective fields are read-only.