Tips Archives - Page 8 of 13 - SamLogic Software Blog

2016-02-212019-07-08

CD-Menu Creator’s button commands explained

Buttons are an important part of a menu interface that is created with CD-Menu Creator. By clicking on buttons the end-user can run programs, open documents, play videos, open web pages, open sub menus, and much more.

To every menu interface button you can select a command that will be executed when the end-user clicks on the button. You can select a command via the Command combo box in the Add Button or Edit Button dialog box.

Below we have listed all button commands that CD-Menu Creator supports. In some cases you can click on a link to read more about the button command and get an example of how to use the command.

Button Commands

Run Program
Choose this command if you want to run a program or start an installation when the button is clicked. This command can be used to run both an EXE file and an MSI file.

Run Program & Close
As above, but the menu interface is automatically closed when the button is clicked.

Show Document
Choose this command if you want to open a document when the button is clicked; for example open a PDF document, a word document, a text file or an HTML document.

Show Internet Page
Choose this command if you want to open a web site or web page on the Internet. It can also be used to open a PDF document on the Internet. If you want to open a HTML page that is distributed with your menu, you can use the Show Document command instead.

Play Movie
Choose this command if you want to play a video when the button is clicked. You can choose between playing the video in a menu window or playing the video using Windows Media Player.

Play Music
Choose this command if you want to play music or play a sound clip when the button is clicked.

Play Flash Animation
Choose this command if you want to show a flash animation. It can also be used to show a video that is saved in the SWF file format.

Show RTF Document
Shows a RTF document in a built-in window. This is useful if you want to show short formated text. No external document viewer needs to be opened.

Open Excel File
Opens an Excel file. Read more about this command here.

Open Picture Gallery
Opens a picture gallery when the button is clicked. If you have some photos or drawings that you want to arrange in a gallery you can use this command. This command can also be used to handle a video clip gallery.

Open Folder
If you want to open a folder on the same drive as the menu when the button is clicked, you can choose this command. The folder will be opened in Windows Explorer.

Send E-mail
If you choose this command and a user clicks on the button, his/her e-mail client will be opened. You can specify a receiver (an e-mail address) and a subject line that is pre-filled, when the e-mail client is opened.

Open New Menu
Opens a new menu with other buttons created with CD-Menu Creator, for example a sub menu.

Return To Previous Menu
Co-operates with the Open New Menu command. Returns to the previous menu, before this menu was opened.

Return To Main Menu
Co-operates with the Open New Menu command. Returns to the main menu. The main menu is typically the first menu that is shown when the CD/DVD or USB stick is inserted in the drive.

Exit
Closes the menu.

2016-02-182019-07-07

Visual Installer: If a specific version of .NET Framework is missing

We have improved Visual Installer’s behaviour in situations where a required version of Microsoft .NET Framework is missing in a computer. Before you could choose between stop the installation or warn the user if a specific version of .NET Framework was missing in the end-user´s computer. But now you can also let the end-user download the missing version of .NET Framework from the Internet and install it. Or, if you distribute .NET Framework with your software, you can start an installation of Microsoft .NET Framework directly from Visual Installer.

This was partially possible already in earlier versions of Visual Installer / Professional using script commands, but now this can be done without script. You can choose if you want this behaviour by selecting an option in Visual Installer’s editor.

How it works
If Visual Installer discovers during the installation of your software that the required version of Microsoft .NET Framework is missing, a mini wizard is started. The mini wizard will help the end-user to start an installation of .NET Framework. Visual Installer pauses the installation until .NET Framework is installed. The pictures below show an example of how it may look like:

Step 1 – Initial information
Step 1

Step 2 – Download information
Step 2

Step 3 – Information about how to continue
Step 3

Where to find this new functionality?
You can turn on and off this new functionality by opening the Special – Setup options menu item and opening the .NET tab:

Setup Options - .NET

In the .NET tab you will find a new option named Download and install .NET Framework. If you select this option, the new behaviour will be invoked if the required version of .NET is missing in the end-user’s computer. If you click on the Options button, you can set some options for this new function. You can for example specify your own download page if you don’t want to use the default download page at Microsoft’s website. You can also specify a language for the download page.

2016-02-182019-07-07

Visual Installer: More available versions of .NET Framework

We have increased the list of available versions of .NET Framework in Visual Installer to also include sub versions of .NET Framework, for example version 4.5.1, 4.5.2 etc. The picture below shows which versions of .NET Framework that Visual Installer currently supports:

More available versions of .NET Framework

Also the scripting language in Visual Installer have been extended to support the above versions.

You can use this functionality, for example, to install a missing version of .NET Framework or to run different tools depending of which versions of .NET Framework that are installed.

Available in Visual Installer 2015 version 10.5.15 and later
The extended list of supported .NET versions is available in Visual Installer 2015 version 10.5.15 and later. If you have an active 1 or 12 months maintenance plan for Visual Installer 2015, you can download this update for free from our download page.

2016-02-162019-07-07

CD-Menu Creator: How to open a folder from a menu

From a menu created with CD-Menu Creator you can run programs, show documents, show pictures, play videos, open web pages + much more. But if you only want to open a folder on the drive. Is it possible?

Yes. It is easy done. Follow the steps below to create a button that opens a folder on the same drive as the menu:

1. Start CD-Menu Creator.
2. Create a new project or open an existing project.
3. Open the Buttons (text) tab.
4. Click on the Add Button button.
5. Enter a button text at the Text (button) input box, for example “Open Folder”.
6. Choose the Open Folder command from the Command list.
7. Enter a folder name at Folder (disc). This is the folder that will be opened when the user clicks on the button. The Add Button dialog box should now look like this:

8. Click OK.
9. Create the menu.

If you have not created the folder (specified at step 7) on your drive yet, you can follow the steps below to create it:
10. Open the folder where the menu was created.
11. Add a sub folder in the creation folder with the same folder name that you specified at step 7 above. For example a sub folder with the folder name MyFolder.

Now you can test your menu. Click on the button in the menu interface that you created:

and the folder will be opened:

In the example above we have added three text files to the folder. But you can add what contents you want to the folder; for example pictures or videos.

2016-02-152020-10-30

CD-Menu Creator: How to open a web page from a menu

Besides opening documents on the local drive you can also open web pages on the Internet from a menu interface created with CD-Menu Creator. There is button command with the name Show Internet Page that can be used to open the web page.

If you choose this command from the Command combo box in the Add Button or Edit Button dialog box, a text box with the name Web Page (URL) is shown. Here you can enter a URL to a web site or web page on the Internet. For example:

http://www.samlogic.net/cd-menu-creator/cd-menu-creator.htm

Also PDF documents can be opened
You can also enter a URL to a PDF document on the web in the Web Page (URL) text box. For example:

http://www.mycompany.com/mydocuments/myuserguide.pdf

If you specify a URL to a PDF document, the PDF document will be opened in the end-user’s web browser. Specifying a URL to a PDF document on the Internet instead of specifying a file path to a local version of the PDF document (that is distributed with your CD/DVD or USB stick) can be a good idea if you update the PDF often. The end-user will then always have access to the latest version of your PDF document. But if you do not update the PDF so often, it is probably better to distribute the PDF with your menu and use the Show Document command in CD-Menu Creator to open the PDF.

If your URL contains uppercase letters
CD-Menu Creator converts normally uppercase letters in URL’s to lowercase letters, but if you need to preserve the uppercase letters in the URL, you can insert a @ character in the beginning of the URL. For example:

@http://www.mycompany.com/MyWebFolder/MyPage.htm

New setup dialog box in Visual Installer: User Options

We have added a new setup dialog box to the Professional version of Visual Installer. The name of the dialog box is User Options and it is a general dialog box where the user can select and unselect options that you add to the setup project. These options co-operates with conditional statements in Visual Installer’s scripting language and with Visual Installer’s Registry tab. Below is an example of how the User Options setup dialog box may look like and how it can be used:

In the example above we have added three options to the setup dialog box. The user can select and unselect the options of his/her choice.

To activate this dialog box, you need first open the Dialog boxes tab in Visual Installer’s editor and check the User options option:

Then you can click on the button marked “…” to the right of the option. This will open a new dialog box in the Visual Installer editor with the title User Options. Below we have filled the dialog box with the text and options that is needed to create the setup dialog box in the example above:

As you see, it is very easy to create a setup dialog box with your own options. You just need to enter a title, a short description text and your options. And it is done!

Co-operates with Visual Installer’s scripting language and ‘Registry’ tab
The main purpose of this new option dialog box is to let the end-user decide which script lines to execute and which keys and values to add to the Registry, during the setup process. This is a more flexible way to handle user choices than file components (file groups) because you don’t necessary need to copy files based on user choices; instead you can use Visual Installer’s whole scripting language to do whatever you want. This is useful if some special operations must be done, based on user choices.

Below we show how Visual Installer’s scripting language can co-operate with the User Options dialog box:

And below we show how the Registry tab in Visual Installer can co-operate with the User Options dialog box:

Scripting language
In Visual Installer’s scripting language we have added a new condition check, IF OPTION(n), that can be used to check which options the user has selected in the User Options setup dialog box. We have added a similar condition check to Visual Installer’s Registry tab: IF_OPTION(n).

The IF OPTION(n) condition in the script language can check both if an option is ON (selected) or OFF (unselected). So for example to examine if option 2 was selected by the end-user, you can enter the following condition:

IF OPTION(2)=ON
…
END IF

If you for example need to examine if option 3 was not selected, you can enter the following condition:

IF OPTION(3)=OFF
…
END IF

‘Registry’ tab
The condition check in the Registry tab works in a similar way. IF_OPTION(n) or IF_OPTION(n)=ON can be used to examine if an option was selected by the end-user. IF_OPTION(n)=OFF can be used to check if an option was not selected.

If you use IF_OPTION(n) and the option number n was selected by the end-user, the key or value will be added to the registry. The example below shows how to examine if option number 1 is selected, and if yes, add a value to registry:

2016-01-262023-07-12

Visual Installer’s scripting language now supports ELSE

SamLogic Visual Installer Logotype We have updated Visual Installer’s built-in scripting language so it now supports an ELSE statement. This will help creating simpler scripts in some situations.

For example, assume that you want to run a particular and specialized application or setup program in a specific version of Windows, and a general application or setup program in all other versions of Windows. Before you needed to cover all Windows version with IF statements and OS checks, but now you only need to check for one OS, and add an ELSE statement to cover the rest. Example:

Example how to use ELSE

2016-01-262019-07-07

With the SETENV command you can set environment variables from Visual Installer

In this blog post we explained how to use Windows’ environment variables in Visual Installer; for example as a part of a file path. You can also create or change values for environment variables in the system during an installation by using a script command in Visual Installer’s scripting language. The name of the command is SETENV and you can use this command to set an environment variable to a specific value. If the environment variable does not exists, it will be created. If it already exists, its value will be updated.

Examples of usage
The example below shows how to use the SETENV command to set an environment variable with the variable name MyVariable to the value MyValue:

// Example 1: Set MyVariable = MyValue
SETENV MyVariable, MyValue

You can also use Visual Installer’s variables (for example %DESTDIR) when you set values. The example below shows how to set an environment variable with the variable name MyAppsFolder to the path %DESTDIR\MyApps:

// Example 2: Set MyAppsFolder = %DESTDIR\MyApps
SETENV MyAppsFolder, %DESTDIR\MyApps

The picture below shows same examples in Visual Installer’s scripting editor:

2015-11-122019-07-07

How to count the number of shortcuts and tiles in the Start menu in Windows 10

As mentioned in this blog post, the Start menu in Windows 10 has a limit of number of shortcuts and tiles that can be added to the menu. In the first release of Windows 10 the limit was 512 items. But in the latest update of Windows 10 (the “Threshold 2″ update) the limit has been increased to 2048 items.

If you use Visual Installer to install files and encounter problems with shortcuts that are not visible in the Start menu, a good first step is to count the number of shortcuts and tiles in the Start menu. This can be done by using Windows PowerShell and running the Get-StartApps | measure command there:

Get-StartApps | measure

Windows Powershell will then display the number of items in the Start menu in the PowerShell window. For example:

Count

If the build number of your Windows 10 is less than 10547 and the count is above 512 you have added / installed too many shortcuts and tiles to the Start menu. If you have a build number that is 10547 or above and the count is above 2048, you have added / installed too many shortcuts and tiles to the Start menu. In the latter case you need to remove some items before you can add new. In the first case you need to update your Windows 10 to the latest version of the operating system.

(To open Windows PowerShell you can enter “powershell” in Windows search box and press Enter; then Windows PowerShell is started. To see the build number you can enter “winver” in the same search box and choose the winver command in the list that is shown.)

2015-11-032020-11-12

Using environment variables in Visual Installer

It is possible to use Windows environment variables in Visual Installer. The environment variables can be used in the Registry tab and in the INI files tab in Visual Installer. You can find a list of supported environment variables in this Wikipedia page (see the Windows section).

You use an environment variable in the same way as a Visual Installer variable. For example, to include the %ProgramFiles% environment variable in a file path you can include it like this:

%ProgramFiles%\SamLogic\Visual Installer

And during the installation the %ProgramFiles% variable will be replaced with the current value that the system returns (usually C:\Program Files (x86)).

The picture below shows how to use the %COMPUTERNAME% environment variable in the Registry tab in Visual Installer:

During the installation the %COMPUTERNAME% variable will be replaced with the current computer name of the computer.