I am looking for a solution on how to setup the Windows CE 6.0 design image to integrate my custom application.
I want after building the image and starting it on the target machine to be able
to access my application from the \Hard Disk\Program Files\CustomApp folder.
In addition I require the application to be persistent. It must not be lost after reboot.
I am aware of copying the application to the Hard Disk out of the NK.BIN but if is possible I want a solution like adding dlls or other files to Windows folder.
I am usign an SQL CE database along with the application so I want the data to be persistent too.
Thanks in advance.
If the \Hard Disk folder contents are not persistent (and I assume they aren't since you're asking this questions), then getting the app to "persist" can be done only as a slight-of-hand trick, just like the contents of the Windows Folder. At boot, the OS will get expanded into RAM, and if you've included your app in that OS, it will get extracted too.
First, you must include your app files (exe, dlls, all dependencies, etc) into the OS image by adding them to a BIB file.
Next, you must understand that all files get extracted to the \Windows folder. There are no exceptions. If you want it in a different folder, you must use a DAT file to tell the OS where to put it one the OS has been extracted. Be aware that the DAT file does a copy, not a move, so if you want it elsewhere, you'll have two copies of the app on the device. A typical solution is to use the DAT file to place a shortcut, not a full copy.
The last part of your question is the hard, or maybe impossible, part. Your database is not going to persist. You could include a copy in the OS, but every time you hard reset, a new copy of the database as it was when the OS was built will get copied out. No new data will survive.
To get that to work, you need a persistent file store on the device. If you're the OEM, you might be able to implement one with any remaining on-board storage (where the OS image file resides) or with separate mounted USB/CF/SD/HDD media. How you do this is highly hardware and BSP dependent, plus it's way more complex than can be described here on SO.Without knowing anything about the target device, it difficult to even give you any pointer on where to begin. Here's a very generic starting point for Flash storage.
Related
When I wanted to export the model I was working on as a Java application, I encountered an error regarding the databases I loaded into the model. When I said OK to the error, I realized that all the files in the folder I wanted to create the Java application were deleted. That folder was desktop by the way.
Right now all the files (i mean all of them!) on my desktop are deleted and they don't even show up in the recycle bin. How are we going to solve this situation? How can AnyLogic have the authority to delete all files in that folder? How is this authority not shared with me and not warned beforehand?
When you work with software in general, you need to have a version control in place that will allow you to recover your information. These problems occur, and if AnyLogic has access to your computer it's because you grant the permission and it needs the permission. If you make your desktop your project folder, then i would say you are to blame.. why would you do that...
Using GIT as Ben commented, is always a good idea... but it requires you to be conscious about when you commit a version.
What I do, is I use dropbox and all my projects are done in a dropbox folder... the good thing is that dropbox always saves automatically all the files on the folder... this has saved my life multiple times and I suggest you to do something like that in the future. So on one hand you have the autosaving features, which is useful, but sometimes you erase everything by mistake, and the autosave is not useful, but dropbox saves no matter what.
I have been asked to provide a solution for a client of mine. They have asked me to build a presentation for a exhibition in a museum that can be updated. The presentation will essentially be galleries of images/videos with associated captions. This presentation computer will have a poor internet connection at best.
I see the best way forward for my client to update the presentation would be to have created a presentation on another computer. They need to do this remotely from exhibition and there will be no network connection between the CMS and presentation computer.
I need them to then be able to export the presentation file onto a USB stick that they could then take to the exhibition.
Once at the exhibition I would like them to be able to put the USB stick into the computer and then for it to automatically copy the information into a folder on the computer and also update a XML file.
What I'm wondering is what would be the best way to program this? I am pretty experienced Flash and PHP programmer and would normally get round allot of these problems by running it all on networked computers running stuff from servers. I know I could quite easily create a presentation system in flash that would load all the info from a folder but getting that folder from one computer to the other seamlessly is not something I'm familiar with. I really don't want the administrators of the system to have to manually copy a folder from one computer to another. It really needs to be click a button and it exports to USB and click a button and it imports from the USB. When it comes to creating programs that export files and copy folders to and from USB sticks I'm pretty lost!! Would this be something that needed done in C++ or something similar? Any advice would be great!
Many thanks for taking the time to read this!
Cheers,
Craig
I think there are several options for this but one that comes to mind is to install and run a complete stack with CMS, MySQL, webserver from a bootable USB drive/stick.
Also check http://portableapps.com/
http://bitnami.org/ may also have something for you.
Another option is to use a CMS that can export and import its content easily.
e.g. hhttp://share.ez.no/download-develop/downloads/
allows users to create content and that content ( or any section of it ) can be exported as zipped package for import into another instance of the CMS. Usually takes less than a minute each way ( unless the export is very large ). The CMS would be installed at both locations running on the local machine. They don't need to be both running the same OS stack.
Sometimes when we issue an upgrade to our application we need to install some files to the application's Data folder. We want to make it possible for the users to move this folder to a place of their liking. But how to deal with this at install time?
I was thinking of deploying to the user's AppData folder and have the application somehow check there for new files at startup.
Any advice or references would be very welcome!
We use InnoSetup for a VB6 application if that matters for your answer.
Generally the best solution I've found is to allow the user to move the folder from within the application.
This allows the application to keep track of where its data is being kept (by adding a reference to it in a file or registry entry which it accesses at load time) and to access it seamlessly in the future.
Your update routines can then also access this information to determine where to place the update files.
Alternatively, make sure the folder name is as distinctive as possible and add a search routine to look for the directory in a number of sensible places at load time. Then write your manual specifying that the data folder can be moved to one of those locations ONLY.
Wouldn't the users just run an update or patch package? I'm not sure why they'd want or need to see such files. It's pretty rare for commercial software to offer users the options of where to store program settings and other internal-use files.
Give some thought to this before putting a lot of stuff into users' roaming profiles. You might want LocalAppData instead.
I'm working on an update for an already existing iphone app. The existing version contains a .sql database file which is used in the app.
I would like to use a new version of this file in the update of the app. On the first startup of the existing app the .sql file is placed in the caches directory of the users iphone. From what I can understand from Apple's documentation the files in the caches directory might get copied from the old app to the new versions caches directory when the user updates the app.
Does this mean that for being sure my new file is used in the updated version I should use a different name of the file?
And what happens with the old file? Do I have to manually delete it from inside the app? Which means I have to check if it's there at every startup of the app?
Thanks
Michael
Yes, you could use a different name, or you could use the same name, and do an "upgrade" (delete and replace) on the first time the user uses a new version.
This does imply checking at every app start, but that's not a bad idea anyways. Having some code that checks versioning at app start lets you put any data upgrade stuff in one place.
One technique is to use NSUserDefaults to keep around two pieces of information: the originally installed version of the app, and the most recently run version of the app. You check these at startup. If they're not there, write both of them. If the most-recent version is lower than the running app version, run your upgrades and bump the version. You could use the first flag to know conditionally in other places whether to expect certain data to be sitting around or not. Having versioning stored explicitly lets you know which version you're upgrading from, too, which might not be obvious if the user hasn't downloaded say 5 intervening updates.
I've written an app that uses some of the user's camera roll images, and while it does so it stores them in the application root directory. The problem I have is that whenever I re-compile my application it changes the folder to which the application is installed.
Is there any way I can specify which folder it should build to, so that any path information stored during it's last run will still be valid?
I don't think that this is something you can stop Xcode from doing unfortunately. It should be copying the data from the old location to the new one but sometimes that just doesn't happen.
The answer suggested in this question looks like the solution you are after.