Advanced Features

Ant Integration

IZPACK can be easily integrated inside an Ant build process. To do so you first need to tell Ant that you would like to use IZPACK :

<!-- Allows us to use the IzPack Ant task -->
<taskdef name="izpack" classpath="${basedir}/lib/compiler.jar"
         classname="com.izforge.izpack.ant.IzPackTask"/>

If you want to use the standalone compiler (and therefore don't need an IzPack installation for building), the task needs to be defined as follows:

<!-- Allows us to use the IzPack Ant task -->
<taskdef name="izpack" classpath="${basedir}/lib/standalone-compiler.jar"
         classname="com.izforge.izpack.ant.IzPackTask"/>

Don't forget to add compiler.jar or standalone-compiler.jar to the classpath of the Ant process.

Then you can invoke IZPACK with the izpack task which takes the following parameters:

input : the XML installation file
output : the output jar installer file
installerType : optional. standard or web. If web, the <webdir> attribute must be specified in the input file (see section 3.6). Used to force creation of a standard installer when the <webdir> attribute has been used.
baseDir : the base directory to resolve the relative paths
izPackDir: the IZPACK home directory. Only neccessary if you do not use the standalone compiler.

Here is a sample of the task invocation:

<!-- We call IzPack -->
<echo message="Makes the installer using IzPack"/>
<izpack input="${dist.dir}/IzPack-install.xml"
        output="${dist.dir}/IzPack-install.jar"
        installerType="standard"
        basedir="${dist.dir}"
        izPackDir="${dist.dir}/"/>

System properties as variable

All system properties are available as $SYSTEM_<variable> where <variable> is the actual name _BUT_ with all separators replaced by '_'. Properties with null values are never stored.

Examples:

$SYSTEM_java_version or $SYSTEM_os_name

Automated Installers

When you conclude your installation with a FinishPanel, the user can save the data for an automatic installation. With this data, he will be able to run the same installation on another similar machine. In an environment where many computers need to be supported this can save a lot of time.

So run once the installation on a machine and save your automatic installation data in auto-install.xml (that's just a sample). Then put this file in the same directory as the installer on another machine. Run it with:
java -jar installer.jar auto-install.xml

It has reproduced the same installation :-)

Picture on the Language Selection Dialog

You can add a picture on the language selection dialog by adding the following resource : installer.langsel.img. GIF, JPEG and PNG pictures are supported starting from J2SE 1.3.

Picture in the installer

It is possible to specify an optional picture to display on the left side of the installer. To do this, you just have to define a resource whose id is Installer.image. For instance,

<res id="Installer.image" src="nice-image.png" />

will do that. If the resource isn't specified, no picture will be displayed at all. GIF, JPEG and PNG pictures are supported starting from J2SE 1.3.

You can also give a specific picture for a specific panel by using the Installer.image.n resource names where is the panel index. For instance if you want a specific picture for the third panel, use Installer.image.2 since the indexes start from 0.

Web Installers

The web installers allow your users to download a small installer that does not contain the files to install. These files will be downloaded from an HTTP server such as Apache HTTPD. If you have many optional packs, this can save people's resources. Its very easy: people download a small Jar file containing the installer, they launch it and choose their packages. Then the installer will get the required packages from individual Jar files located on a server, only downloading those required. It's that simple.

To create a web installer, add the <webdir> element to the <info> element (see section 2.3.2). The text must be a valid, fully qualified URL for a direcory on the web server.

<info>
  <appname>Super extractor</appname>
  <appversion>2.1 beta 6</appversion>
  <url>http://www.superextractor.com/</url>
  <webdir>http://www.superextractor.com/download</url>
</info>

You can force creation of a standard installer even if webdir is specified, by specifically creating a standard installer from the command line invocation or ant task (see ).

When installing, if the user is behind a firewall, attempting download the jar files may fail. If this happens, the user will be prompted to enter the name hostname and port of their firewall.

You may password protect the files using mechanisms provided by your web server, IzPack will prompt for a password at install time, when required.

More Internationalization

Special resources

IzPack is available in several languages. However you might want to internationalize some additional parts of your installer. In particular you might want this for the *InfoPanel and *LicencePanel. This is actually pretty easy to do. You just have to add one resource per localization, suffixed with the ISO3 language code. At runtime these panels will try to load a localized version.

For instance let's suppose that we use a HTMLInfoPanel. Suppose that we have it in English, French and German. We want to have a French text for french users. Here we add a resource pointing to the French text whose name is HTMLInfoPanel.info_fra. And that's it ! English and German users (or anywhere other than in France) will get the default text (denoted by HTMLInfoPanel.info) and the French users will get the French version. Same thing for the other Licence and Info panels.

To sum up : add _<iso3 code> to the resource name for InfoPanel, HTMLInfoPanel, LicencePanel and HTMLLicencePanel.

Packs

Thanks to Thorsten Kamann, it is possible to translate the packs names and descriptions. To do that, you have to define a special identifier in the elements of the XML installation file and add the related entries in the suitable langpacks. For instance if you have the following XML snippet:

<pack name="core" id="core.package" ...>
  <description/>
</pack>

then the related entries of the langpacks will look like this:

<str id="core.package" txt="Core Package"/>
<str id="core.package.description" txt="The core package provides

Julien Ponge 2005-04-22