They might be quite obscure: i enjoy RazorSQL for all it can do, and it is the only tool i found that talks properly is Clarions's ODBC driver. It also allows for awesome command line calls to export data.
Trouble is: RazorSQL stores profile connection information based on the user that installed it, and when you set a Windows task to run the batch files of all the groovy export commands, the internal batch file fail without external notification because the user is SYSTEM (as we don't want this tied to any one user)..
I do not recall if there was an option on install allowing profiles to be seen by all, as i normally set this to everyone on my dev box (as it is only me).
So the question: has anyone encountered this obscure scenario, and knows how to have RazorSQL look in a generic location for connection details?
RazorSQL checks for system property named "razorPortable". When defined with a value of "portable" it keeps all its stuff in a RazorSQL folder under its main directory, so shared by all users launching it with said property defined.
So you know the drill: edit some of the bundled bat files and add -DrazorPortable=portable to the command line.
You'll need to re-enter yout registration code, connection profiles, preferences, etc. Or you can manually move them.
Related
I am trying to install a installer developed using InstallShield 2008. While installing after selecting the destination path i am aborting the installation.
When i try to install again by default it is taking the destination path as previously given path which was provided before aborting the installation.
And also it is not allowing me to install in different path.
For Example:
*Step1 : Installation starts
Step2: Destination path as C:\Installer
Step3: Click next and abort installation
Step4: Start the installation again
Step5: Provide Different destination path as C:\Installer1*
Here installation is failed. Because destination is still pointing to Step2
My question is from where Installer is taking the old path.?
Persisted Path: The technicalities appear to be relatively straightforward: the old path is read back either from the registry or from disk each time the setup is launched, and a custom action in the setup's GUI sequence must have persisted the path "somewhere" during the first run (this is erroneous design, see technical comment below). Reading back the value can be done by using AppSearch (built-in MSI feature) or by means of a custom action.
Registry / Disk: As to finding where the value is read from. The easiest would be to just search the registry first for the literal path. Just open regedit.exe and search for the path there. You can also look for the custom action that does the persisting (or the AppSearch or custom action that does the retrieval) and see if it is a script with code you can see - then you should be able to see where it has persisted the path. Use Orca or a similar tool to view the Custom Action table. The custom action can also be compiled and undecipherable. Do you have the setup source? The path can also be persisted to disk, but the registry is most commonly used. Remember to search both HKCU and HKLM.
Involved Debugging: I can't see why you would, but it is also possible to use ProcMon.exe to monitor what registry locations your MSI reads and / or writes to. This is involved debugging and should never be needed for something this simple. Just mentioning it as a technical option. Generally the last resort we have to figure out the strangest problems.
Technical Comment: MSI setups are not supposed to write anything to the registry or disk from the setup's user interface sequence (setup dialogs). All changes should be made from the installation sequence (InstallExecuteSequence) which also generally runs with elevated rights - the user interface normally runs with user rights. This InstallExecuteSequence sequence is kicked off from the last dialog in the GUI sequence, and runs the file copy and system change operations. Control then returns to the GUI sequence to show the setup complete dialogs. It is also possible to run the setup silently, in which case the InstallUISequence never runs and all custom actions inserted there fail to run. Accordingly custom actions should be present in the InstallExecuteSequence as well as the InstallUISequence if they are to run in silent mode. This potential design flaw is a very common silent deployment error which occurs when setups are not designed properly for silent running. Remember that all corporate deployment runs silently. Setup GUI is highly overrated (in my opinion - a "fact" that could change in the future).
It is still possible for an MSI setup to write to the registry or disk from the InstallUISequence by using a custom action to do so. Such a custom action would normally not have access to write to HKLM or to protected parts of the disk - unless the whole setup runs elevated because it was launched from an elevated command prompt (for example), or launched by an admin who elevates it via the UAC prompt.
In other words: this setup is badly designed, but I guess that is clear already.
Our application is deployed to the target machine with an msi file. All works nicely. Our tester has gone through his plan, and one of the tests requires deleting the application's configuration file. The application is designed to alert the user with a dialog on startup saying "missing config". However, what happens is that - somehow! - the software starts the installer again and retrieves the missing file from the msi! Which is nice, but not what we want. How do we disable that behaviour?
without going into much depth of the windows installer mechanics (if you interested in that there a plenty of articles about this), the shortcut of the software is probably advertised, which means the windows installer checks if everything is in its place before the software is started.
if you can edit the msi, make the shortcut non advertised.
if you can't, install it with DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS
e.g. msiexec /i myMsi.msi DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS=1
please note that this is only a quick (and dirty) workaround,
to fix this proper you need to understand the whole windows installer advertising (also called repair or self resiliency) mechanism.
but explaining all the causes and the mechanism of the repair is far beyond this answer and there are quite some articles and posts about that on the internet (and especially on MSDN and stackoverflow)
There is a more correct answer to this, and it is NOT DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS. You set the component id to null in the MSI file to prevent repair of that individual file. See ComponentId comments here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa368007(v=vs.85).aspx
Edit the MSI file with Orca to delete the Componenty ID, and write an uninstall custom action to delete the file at uninstall if it's there.
In addition, that's a redundant test. Windows will restore that file for you if it's missing, so the idea that you need a test to notify that it's missing is pointless. The true test should be that Windows will restore the file if it's lost, and your app needs to do potentially nothing about the missing file.
You don't mention what tool you are using to make your MSI but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess Visual Studio Deployment Projects (.VDRPOJ).
One of the (many) horrible things about this tool was that it fails to expose the foundational concept of components. Instead it makes every file a key file of it's own component and hides the existence of the component from you. I say 'was' because Microsoft killed this project type in VS. There are around 50k people complaining on UserVoice to bring this tool back and I'm guessing that 49,990 of them don't know what a key path is.
Windows Installer has a concept called the component rules and each component has a keypath. The keypath teaches MSI how to handle repair scenarios. But your tool has to allow you to be able to control this to make it work.
Windows Installer is functioning exactly the way it's supposed to function. You just aren't up to speed on what that is.
However, if you want to ignore Windows Installer best practices and continue using the tool you use today, the trick is to install the app.config file as a different file. Then have the application copy the file to the real file name on run. Windows Installer won't service what it didn't install.
Several answers have been provided that can work:
You can install the file with a blank guid. Then you need to remove it on uninstall using the RemoveFile feature. You will also run into issues if you want to replace it during an upgrade. Could be tricky at times.
You can disable the advertised shortcut(s), but this affects too much in my opinion.
Finally you can use my suggestion to install a separate non-advertised shortcut to use to launch the application. Such a shortcut bypasses the self-repair check. It may still be invoked by other means such as missing file associations, COM registration or similar, but those are exception states.
However, my preference is that an application can start without a config file present, if at all possible. I always suggest a good startup routine with "internal defaults" available. The startup routine should also degrade gracefully if faced with any file system access denied conditions.
Most importantly you should place this config file in the userprofile so you can generate the file on first launch for the user in question. It can even be copied from a read-only copy in the main installation directory.
When you generate a file from internal defaults and put it in a userprofile location, the file will have no interference with Windows Installer at all. The issues that results is how to clean up user data on uninstall. I discussed this with Stefan Kruger (MSI MVP) at one point, and I agree with his notion that user data is indeed user data and should not be automatically dealt with by your installer at all. Leave it installed, and clean it up via system administrator tools if necessary - for example logon scripts.
I just discovered why Maven doesn't work properly on my machine. For some reason it reads the user configuration from the completely wrong location. And I don't understand why. When I run maven with the -X switch I get the following output in the beginning:
[DEBUG] Reading global settings from D:\dev\maven\active\conf\settings.xml
[DEBUG] Reading user settings from D:\.m2\settings.xml
[DEBUG] Using local repository at D:\dev\maven_repo
Why is it reading user settings from D:\.m2 and not my actual user directory like it normally should? It worked fine on my old computer. Does it have something to do with me having installed maven on a different drive this time? On my old computer it was installed on the C drive.
Where does it get this D:\.m2 from? How can I make it read the user settings file from the actual default location, %userprofile%\.m2?
Finally figured it out. Found the solution in this blog post. To find the home directory in Java you do this:
System.getProperty("user.home");
Problem is, for some dumb reason, Java isn't using Windows environment variables or anything like that to find this path. It actually uses the parent directory of the Desktop directory. Since I like to keep certain main folders in my user directory on a separate drive (documents, downloads, music, desktop, etc) I had moved the desktop directory to D:\Desktop. Java then takes that directory, goes one level up and makes Maven and other java applications think D:\ is my home directory.
Gotta say the more I use Java the more i hate it... anyways, hopefully this might help save some hours of head scratching for someone else too.
Update
The original blog post is gone, but found on the WaybackMachine (the URL has been updated), but here's the gist from that post in case that goes too...
The issue: So how does Java play into all of this? Well, Java
developers sometimes want to store settings for their applications in
a folder within the user’s profile directory. It’s the Linux way, and
Java tends to do things the Linux way. (As mentioned earlier, Windows’
“AppData” folder servers the same purpose, with some extra separation
for data dependent on whether or not it should roam with the user’s
profile.) For some reason, Java does not use the Windows environment
variable to determine the location of the user’s profile, but instead
access a registry key that references the user’s desktop folder. It
then takes the parent directory of the desktop and assumes that is the
user’s profile folder (assuming the user makes use of the default
setup Windows chooses).
Essentially, when a programmer calls the Java command:
System.getProperty("user.home");
Java uses the following idea to determine where my user profile folder
is:
PATH_TO_DESKTOP_FOLDER_AS_SET_IN_THE_REGISTRY + "\..\"
This breaks down when the desktop folder has been modified.
So, with my setup, instead of saving settings at:
c:\users\tim\
Java apps tend to save data to:
t:\tim\
In reality, Java apps should save settings to:
c:\users\tim\AppData\Roaming\
or something like that.
To add insult to injury, the Java apps continue to follow the Linux
way and use a period at the beginning of the folder name in an attempt
to “hide” the folder (as is done on Linux). For Windows users, this
simply ensures these folders are listed first in directory listings.
(Hiding a folder on Windows is achieved through setting the hidden
attribute for the file.)
It looks like NetBeans has addressed the issue for their application,
but the root issue remains an unresolved, low priority bug. Somehow
I’d bet it would get fixed a lot faster if the mechanism for
determining the user’s home path on Linux was wrong.
I am using windows installer to create setup project.
How I can remove/delete application files from AppData\Roaming folder when application uninstalled.
I tried added a special folder and set DefaultLocaltion to [AppDataFolder] but it didn't working.
Do I need to do anything else?
I'd need to understand what you are trying to do to give you specific advice. In general what you are trying to do would be OK removing files from CommonAppDataFolder but not AppDataFolder as trying to clanup user data from multiple user profiles is not a best practice. Additionally trying to cleanup Roaming Profile User data is outright impossible because the other users aren't logged on.
You'll want to read:
Managing Roaming User Data Deployment Guide
Assuming you are trying to do what I think you are, you'll need a cleanup script / exe that you leave behind on uninstall and a custom action to write to the registry during uninstall ( MSI can't do this natively ) to call that script/EXE. You'll want to leverage the Active Setup trick as described here:
Using Active Setup to Repair User Settings
The way it'll work is your uninstall leaves the EXE and registry entry behind so that when a user logs on it's roaming data gets pulled down from the server to local and Active Setup realizes it hasn't run the script yet. The script runs (once) and the data is deleted. When the user logs off the data is replicated / deleted on the server. Then they log on again it doesn't run again.
By default Windows Installer does not remove the files created by your application, after the installation. To do that you need to either write your own custom action, that will run upon uninstall, or depending on the tool used for authoring the MSI, you can use built-in options for cleaning the application locations, as some tools have this support.
It seems that the stock bootstrapping process is a bit lacking on Windows.
Linux has cloud-init which will install packages, store files, and run a bash script from user data.
Windows has ec2config but there is currently no support to run a cmd or powershell script when the system is "ready"--meaning that all the initial reboots are completed.
There seem to be third party options. For example RightScale has the RightLink agent which performs this function.
Are there open source options available?
Are there any plans to add this feature to Ec2Config?
Do I have to build this my self?
Am I missing something?
It appears that EC2Config on the Amazon-provided AMIs now supports "User Data Scripts" as of the 11-April-2012 updates.
The documentation has not yet been updated, so it's hard to tell if it supports PowerShell or just cmd.exe scripts. I've posted a question on the AWS forums to try and get some more detail, and will update here when I learn more.
UPDATE: It looks like cmd.exe batch syntax is supported, which can in turn invoke PowerShell. There's a new version of the EC2Config documentation included on the AMI. Quoting from it:
[EC2Config] will read in the user data specified for the instance and then check if it contain the tags <script> and </script>. If it finds both then it will take the information between those two tags and save it to a batch file located in the Settings folder of this application. It will then execute the batch file during the start of an instance.
The batch file will only be created and executed on the first launch of an instance after a sysprep. If you want to have the batch file created and executed again set the Ec2HandleUserdata plugin state to Enabled.
UPDATE 2: My interpretation is confirmed by Shon from the AWS Team
UPDATE 3: And as of the May-2012 AMIs, PowerShell is supported using the <powershell/> tag.
Cloudbase.it have opensourced a python windows service they call cloudbase-init which follows the configdrive and HTTP datasources.
http://www.cloudbase.it/cloud-init-for-windows-instances/
github here
https://github.com/stackforge/cloudbase-init/
I had to build one myself however it was very easy. Just made a service that reads the user-data when starts up and executes the file as a powershell script.
To get around the issue of not knowing when to start the service I just made the service start type as "delayed-auto" and that seemed to fix the problem. Depending on what you need to do to the system that may or may not work for you however in my case that was all I had to do.
I added a new codeplex project that already has this tool built for windows. Looking forward to some feedback.
http://cloudinitnet.codeplex.com/
We had to build it ourselves; we did it with a custom service and built our own AMIs. There's no provision currently within EC2Config to do it.
Even better, there is no easy way to determine when the instance is "ready". We had to do it by tailing the logfile of EC2Config.
I've recently found nssm (at nssm.cc) which easily wraps a simple batch file (or pretty much anything else) as a service. You can then us sc config servic1 depend= service0 to force the batch file to be run at a particular point in the service initialization sequence. I am using it in between ex2config and sql express to create a folder on d, for instance. You'll have to use the services tool to make it run as network services and change the AppExit property to Ignore using regedit, but it works once you get it all in place.