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 Installer 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.
The installation wizard of Excelsior Installer 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 within Start Menu. There are three 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.
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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, 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.
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.
Not available in Standard Edition:
On the Post-install actions tab, you may specify a list of typical post-install actions that the user can select on the last page of the Excelsior Installer GUI wizard. Examples are launching the application just installed, viewing the readme file, restarting the system, and the like.
You set up a post-install action as follows:
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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 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 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.
Finally, on this tab you can select a clean-up policy for installation folders upon uninstall.
To specify the runnable file, click Select in the After-install runnable pane and select the desired file from the package. If you need to specify command line arguments to the runnable, type them in the Arguments field. Values of the arguments may contain references to root directories from the package in the form $(root-name). For example, if you specify an argument $(Root)\MyFiles\InstallStuff, the installer will expand $(Root) to the absolute path of the installation directory on the target system.
The selected runnable file will be started when the user pressed the Finish button on the last dialog of the installation wizard.
Note: You should not rely on that the runnable starts in a particular working directory. If it needs to access the package files, you can specify the necessary arguments for the runnable as described above.
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 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.