MichaelWithers
12th July 2007 11:00 UTC

Is compression / archiving Mandatory with NSIS
I have been considering using NSIS as an installer for a product I have developed and iam unsure if I can achieve everything I need to achieve with NSIS.

I have a software product that is basically a website and is about 400mb in size that needs to be installable from a CD and be able to run off the CD. This means putting all the website content onto the installer CD uncompressed in a convential file structure. Because it needs to be installable I also need to have an installer that will just copy all the content from the CD to a location on a hard-drive and do basic tasks such as setting up the start menu short cuts etc. Having the ability to uninstall would also be desirable.

Ive tried writing something simple in VB6 to take care of this, but getting such things as progress bars to work in VB6 seems to be a challenge and I feel the time would better be spent learning NSIS or a alternative that could cater for my needs!

Thanks Guys

Mike

thek
12th July 2007 11:21 UTC

Hi

you don't have to put the files inside the installer, There is a "CopyFiles" commando where you can easily do the stuff you want to achieve.
(In my installer I use this to copy demo data if available)

The only problem is, that you have to set the progressbar manually (as far as I know) because NSIS does it via the "File" command

But this is also not such a big problem!

{_trueparuex^}
12th July 2007 11:39 UTC

Progressbar moves along with any instruction inside sections, but if you have just one "CopyFiles" command with wildcards the progressbar will move just once. So you need to create serval "CopyFiles" to make the progressbar run smoothly. :)

MichaelWithers
12th July 2007 11:55 UTC

Thanks guys for the swift and intelligable response - ill make it my priority to start learning NSIS in this case :-) and stop screwing with VB6!

Thanks again Mike