Recent changes to feature-requests

Initial screen language

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 02:49:57 -0000

Dear team InstallJammer's

Please, would add an option that permit translate the first screen, that prompts your language to select an idiom?

Thank you,
Glauber.

examples for verifying installjammer

Maarten Nieber — Sun, 03 May 2009 15:40:29 -0000

At present, when running into a problem it is hard to know if you (as end user) did something wrong, or if installjammer has a bug.
Therefore, it would really help to have one or a few small example projects that can be used to verify that the basic behaviour of installjammer is correct.

For example, installerjammer could ship with an example.mpi project that:
- has a start.bat file that (on Windows) prints a message on the console and asks the user to press a key
- has a start.sh file that does the same thing on linux
- has an custom icon (I suppose that shortcuts on Windows or Linux can use this icon to represent the installed 'example' program, although I did not yet succeed with this)
- installs these files on Linux or Windows, allowing the user to place shortcuts on the desktop and in the Applications (or Programs) menu

If you run into a problem, I could first check whether the problem occurs the example project that ships with installjammer.

Command-line interface, passing arguments to control script

Luke Kucalaba — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:39:03 -0000

Hi,

I am working on streamlining our software build process, automating everything from svn checkout to building the final installer. I looked at the docs section about the InstallJammer command-line interface, and didn't immediately find any way to pass arguments to a control script (using the --control-script command-line option). My goal is to be able to enable/disable installer components or filegroups from the InstallJammer command-line, based on the current build configuration (we use CMake for our configuration software). Well, I saw there wasn't any explicit method to pass arguments to the control-script, so my first workaround was to define "temporary" virtual text strings like "ENABLE_COMPONENT_X" by using the -D<variable> command-line switch. I don't want these variables stored in the actual mpi project file, because they are only used in automatic builds and don't have any meaning when you manually open InstallJammer to build the installer. Anyway, I determined that this just doesn't work if the virtual variable isn't already created ahead of time in the project file. I am able to set virtual text strings via "-D<variable>" only if the variable was already defined in the project.

I guess this is a feature request for the InstallJammer author... Can we change the behavior of the -D<variable> implementation, in that if the variable is not yet defined in the project, then define it and set the value to the value passed in the command-line? In the meantime, as a workaround I will have to store all these temp virtual text strings in the project file.

Thanks!
Luke

Luke Kucalaba
Senior Software Engineer
D&S Consultants, Inc
Columbus, Ohio

Encoding in "Replace Text In File" and "Write Text To File"

Nick Bennett — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:27:38 -0000

I have an application in which the installer must be in Spanish and English (the client is a Mexican company), and in which a value selected from a combobox widget (along with other values typed into text and entry widgets) ends up being embedded in an XML file. Currently, this is implemented with the "Read File Into Virtual Text" action (to populate the virtual text variable that provides values for the combobox), followed by the "Replace Text In File" action (to write the selected value into the XML file).

We've standardized on UTF-8 encoding for all of our text resources, and the original XML file contains characters for which the UTF-8 encoding results in byte values which are invalid in ISO-8859-1 (which would otherwise be a reasonable default encoding). However, when the values written to the file include non-ASCII characters, they are written out as as Windows-1252 (i.e. single-byte ANSI encoding - like ISO-8859-1 - but including the values between 0x80 and 0x9F as characters). When a conformant XML parser reads the file and encounters these characters (which generally result in byte sequences that are not valid in UTF-8), the disagreement between the actual encoding and the declared encoding (found in the XML text declaration at the start of the file) will cause a fatal parsing error.

This behavior of the "Replace Text In File" action is seen whether the replacement values are entered directly (e.g. typed in the Values property of a combobox widget) or are read with the "Read File Into Virtual Text" action, using the UTF-8 encoding. The attached .zip archive includes an InstallJammer v1.2.9 project (the same behavior is seen in v1.2.8), along with a file containing values used to populate a combobox, and a UTF-8-encoded XML file.

As a default behavior for the "Replace Text In File" action, this is not surprising, since the original XML file doesn't include the optional quasi-byte-order-mark (0xEF 0xBB 0xBF) which is sometimes (but usually not) included in UTF-8 files. However, the ability to set the encoding explicitly is clearly (in my opinion) a missing feature - especially since we can control the encoding used by the "Read File Into Virtual Text" action.

I suggest that the Encoding property be added to the "Replace Text In File" and "Write Text To File" actions.

Tab and shift-tab in text widgets

Nick Bennett — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 22:00:43 -0000

A text widget that is added to a pane with the Add Widget action will echo the tab key to its contents at runtime, when it has focus. This does not follow the common user interface convention in which tab (and shift-tab) cycle through buttons, pull-downs, and other controls in order (or reverse order). This convention is followed by most of the InstallJammer widgets, but the text widget is a notable exception.

Rich-text editing controls generally don't follow this convention, since a tab character is much more likely to be embedded in the content of such a field. However, since the text widget is not a rich-text control, there is rarely much value (in my opinion) in the ability to include a typed tab character in its content.

I recommend that this behavior be changed, so that the default behavior is such that when a text widget has focus, typing the tab key will move focus to the next control, and shift-tab will move focus to the previous control. (There are some instances in which inclusion of a tab character in a text field is useful or even necessary; I recommend that these be handled by allowing the user to paste such text into the content of a text widget - and/or by echoing a tab character to the field contents when the the tab key is pressed with a modifier such as the ctrl key.

Windows service description

John Bratteli — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:49:19 -0000

The Windows service GUI has a column for a description of the service. It would be nice if IJ could put something there.

UI convenience

John Bratteli — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:15:37 -0000

A small thing - it would be nice if any disabled components in the Install Panes and Actions frame would be grayed out, making them easier to spot.

Remove window before Welcome Screen

Larry Engholm — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 03:54:34 -0000

I think InstallJammer would be improved if you disabled or removed "Exit" in "Startup Actions," which displays the now useless "This will install Your Application Name on your computer. Continue?" window before the Welcome Screen.

The simple work around of setting Active to No works for me. I'm reporting this to improve InstallJammer for everybody else.

This was discussed at http://www.installjammer.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=413.

7z (LZMA) compression

Anonymous — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:53:44 -0000

It would be Nice to have support for 7z (LZMA) compression. This would allow much stronger compression, like NSIS has it for example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7z

Parameter for GUI building

nagyi — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:11:13 -0000

Like the Test-installer form I need a Command-Line textfield for building. Then I can pass parameters to the building process, without changing them in the project. Then it works like the using InstallJammer from commandline to build new installer.

Then I use the Virtual Text's value in the project as default value. If I don't pass any commandline arguments, it will use the stored value from project. When I change the Virtual Text and I forget to set back than the wrong value will be the default setting.