A few questions during evaluation

[mannaggia]

I'm trying out InstallAware - I like it so far. It's very much like the Wise InstallBuilder that I am currently using.

A few questions that I could not find an answer to in the help file:

1) The dialogs provided include "licensecheck" and "readme" dialogs that load a support file such as license.txt. It looks like they are "memo" controls - what links those controls to the support files? I didn't see anything in the properties of the memo control where I could specify that the data comes from a file.

2) I tried including a memo control on one of my dialogs and I entered several lines of text to display in the memo field, but when I run the installer it does not provide the ability to scroll the text. Is there a way to do that?

3) I created a dialog that contains 3 checkboxes. I want to specify the default values (checked or unchecked) for those checkboxes based on some registry settings that would already exist before the installer starts. How do I set the defaults values for those checkboxes before the dialog displays?

Unless I have missed it, I see relatively little documentation on designing dialogs and specifics about control properties and using controls.

[MichaelNesmith]

Hi There,

1) Double-click the control, and a new window will pop up where you set the extended control properties, including the information the control receives.

2) Should be automatic - make sure you didn't disable the scrollbars in the dialog designer.

3) In the same window that pops up when you double-click the control, there is a field where you can bind the control to a variable - so it will read from and write to that variable. Then, in your script, just declare your variable before showing the dialog, and assign it the initial value. After showing the dialog you can just dereference the variable to obtain its latest value.

InstallAware has been called a better Wise for Windows Installer than Wise itself - enjoy! You should find the scripting very familiar and easy to use.

For a step-by-step tutorial on using the dialog editor to get/set control values and interact with those values in the script, just read:

www.installaware.com/MSDN_Magazine_Europe.pdf

[mannaggia]

2) Should be automatic - make sure you didn't disable the scrollbars in the dialog designer.

All I did was place a memo control in the dialog - I don't even see a property where I would disable scrollbars.

These are the steps I did:

- Click on the Memo control in the toolbar
- Click on an empty area in my dialog, which places the Memo control there
- In the Object Properties, I clicked on the Lines property "(TMemoStrings"), which popped up a window.
- I pasted several lines (44 lines) from a text file into that window and clicked OK.
- Clicked File/Save, File/Exit from the dialog editor
- I built and ran the installer.

When I get to the dialog with that Memo field, it has no scrollbars in the control. I can highlight the text in the memo control and as I drag the mouse down, as it highlights the text, it does scroll then, so it is all there but no scrollbars.

I also don't see a property for the Memo control that relates to scrollbars. I see: Align, Alignment, BevelEdges, BevelInner, BevelKind, BevelOuter, BiDiMode, BorderStyle, Color, Cursor, Enabled, Font, Height, HideSelection, Left, Lines, MaxLength, Name, Top Visible, WantReturns, Width, WordWrap.

None of these seem to have anything to do with scrollbars. What am I missing?

(Most of these properties are self-explanatory, but I don't see any of them documented in the help file.)

[MichaelNesmith]

Ah, I think you got a point there. Use the richedit control - that one features automatic scroll bar placement.