Customizing a Standard Setup

Package and Deployment Wizard’s automated process will generate a fully usable, professional setup that you can distribute to users or to Internet developers. Sometimes, however, you will need to go beyond Package and Deployment Wizard’s end products and alter the standard setup that it creates.

You might need to customize Package and Deployment Wizard’s product in situations such as the following:

• The setup process needs to perform special operations, such as providing a dialog box to determine user preferences for your application.

• You need to modify the distribution files slightly, providing a different name or a different version of an existing file or providing an extra supporting file.

1. Customizing SETUP.LST and Your Application’s DEP File

2. Customizing the Standard VB Setup Project

3. Implementing Application Removal

Customizing SETUP.LST and Your Application’s DEP File

You can modify the information about files that you need to distribute with your application’s setup by editing SETUP.LST and your application’s DEP file. By editing SETUP.LST and the DEP file, you can avoid having to rerun Package and Deployment Wizard for minor changes in your application’s setup configuration.

Suppose, for example, that your application no longer uses a particular custom control, say DBGrid (you have removed all functionality of DBGrid from your application). Instead of rerunning Package and Deployment Wizard just to create a new setup that lacks DBGrid, you could edit the copy of SETUP.LST on your master distribution media. You would just open SETUP.LST in Notepad or another text editor and search for the line in SETUP.LST that refers to DBGrid.OCX. You could remove the line, and then save and exit the file. Then, you could go to the DEP file for your application and remove the reference there for DBGrid.

Customizing the Standard VB Setup Project

You can modify the setup routine for your application by locating and editing its VB source code. Recall that Package and Deployment Wizard provides the setup program (SETUP1.EXE) for your application.

FIGURE 21.17 You can customize an application’s setup routine by opening and modifying SETUP1.VBP. The designer for frmSetup1 is shown here.

Setup1 is a VB application known as the "Setup Toolkit project," and its VB project exists under your VB directory in the path \Wizards\Package and Deployment Wizard\Setup1\SETUP1.VBP. If you want to customize the Setup1 project (known as the "Setup Toolkit project"), you should save the customized version in a separate directory so that future sessions of Package and Deployment Wizard won’t use it for all applications. The Setup Toolkit project contains many files, but the main focus of your customization efforts will probably be the Load event of the Setup1 project’s main form, frmSetup1 (see Figure 21.17).

Implementing Application Removal

Setup1 creates a log file (ST6UNST.LOG) in the application directory containing information about the modifications that it makes to the system (such as files copied and Windows Registry entries). Setup1 also furnishes a VB6 application removal utility, ST6UNST.EXE.

The application appears on the Add/Remove facility of the Control Panel. If the user calls Add/Remove to remove the application, the system uses ST6UNST.EXE, which reads the log file and undoes the work of the setup.

Application removal can fail under the following circumstances:

• If the user or another application copies, moves, or removes application files and directories manually.

• The application setup log is removed from the application directory.

• The user installs the application more than once to more than one directory.

NOTE - The Relationship Between SETUP.EXE and Customized Setup Routines: For an explanation of the relationship between Microsoft’s SETUP.EXE and your customized setup routine, see the section in this chapter titled "SETUP.EXE and Package and Deployment Wizard’s Custom Setup."