Completely Silent Updater

[fingertapps]

Hi there,
We're trying to use the advanced updater to update our program, and so far it's saved us a ton of work implementing our own updater. That said, I have a few questions.

First, is it possible to translate the Advanced Updater? It doesn't automatically get translated when multiple languages are enabled for the msi project it is attached to, so i can only assume that it hasn't been translated at all?

Since it can't be translated, we wanted to silence it completely. Basically the behavior of the /silentall option, but with a no presence on the user's desktop at all, not even the current taskbar icon. The reasoning is if we can't translate it, don't show it at all (this is what we did with our previous updater).

It would be greatly appreciated if you could give me some pointers on how to translate the updater to different languages, or how to completely disable all user interaction with the updater (i've also tried the -minuseraction switch with it's respective updater mode, but this is even more verbose than /silentall).

[Bogdan]

Hi,

First, is it possible to translate the Advanced Updater?

Yes, the updater.exe from our application uses to system language for its UI. Only if the language of the system on which it is not running is not recognized the updater
will be using the default, i.e. English, but this is quite unlikely since the updater is localized for 35 languages.

Since it can't be translated, we wanted to silence it completely

As I already said above the updater is localized, but you can also set it to run silently. Here are more details about the command line switches that can be used for the updater. The one you are interested I think is the following:

Code: Select all

/silentall

Please let us know if you have other questions.

Regards,
Bogdan

[fingertapps]

Hi Bogdan,

Our own program uses the windows format locale to set the program language. After seeing your above forum post we also set the Windows Display Language and the Location for the appropriate country. Unfortunately this translated only the buttons in the advanced updater. This is an improvement, but what needs to be set to see the whole updater translated?

As for the /silentall option, i mentioned in my original post that we are already using that option, and that we wanted something even more silent (no system tray icon). But if the translation works then this is less relevant.

[fingertapps]

As a note, we're using Japanese, Korean and French for testing at the moment. Our full list is about 15 languages, all of which are supported by advanced installer, so i assume they would also be supported by advanced updater.

[fingertapps]

Hi,

I know i should probably make this a separate thread, but i have a little feature to request; it would also be nice to be able to specify a maximum update check frequency with the updated scheduled as a windows task, so we can try to run the installer every 15 minutes but only query our servers every 2 days, to make sure it gets run while users have their computers on (due to the lack of a "run as soon as possible" option).

Currently i've just ripped the ini file and updater exe from one of our installs, then manually added them to our current installer project to get the desired effect.

[Cosmin]

Hi,

Unfortunately this translated only the buttons in the advanced updater.

I'm not sure why this happens. What Windows version are you using and in what language was it installed?

As for the /silentall option, i mentioned in my original post that we are already using that option, and that we wanted something even more silent (no system tray icon).

Unfortunately there is no option which hides the system tray icon. We will consider adding one in the future. Thank you for your suggestion.

it would also be nice to be able to specify a maximum update check frequency with the updated scheduled as a windows task, so we can try to run the installer every 15 minutes but only query our servers every 2 days, to make sure it gets run while users have their computers on (due to the lack of a "run as soon as possible" option).

I'm not sure I fully understand this functionality. Can you please give me more details about it, perhaps an usage scenario?

Regards,
Cosmin

[fingertapps]

it would also be nice to be able to specify a maximum update check frequency with the updated scheduled as a windows task, so we can try to run the installer every 15 minutes but only query our servers every 2 days, to make sure it gets run while users have their computers on (due to the lack of a "run as soon as possible" option).

I'm not sure I fully understand this functionality. Can you please give me more details about it, perhaps an usage scenario?

If you go to the "Updater" page in an installer project and select the "As a Windows scheduled task" option from the "Run Updater" group, the text box which specifies the maximum update frequency (Check for updates every x days) is disabled, and you cannot manually edit the ini file in the install project to add the CheckFrequency parameter. I worked around this by selecting "From my application, as often as possible" and specifying a scheduled task separately in the Scheduled tasks page, rather than scheduling a task from the Updater page. I hope this makes a bit more sense.

This will hopefully give us a high execution probability, to allow for the fact there is no "Run scheduled task as soon as possible after it is missed" option, but we will still only hit the server with an update query every couple of days.

As for the language problem; we're testing on machines that are running Windows 7 installed as English (New Zealand), and English (US), then we are tweaking the language and regional settings to trigger the install and our application to change to a different language. As i have said, changing the date/time/currency format settings (the format tab of the Region and Language settings in Windows) to a different country changes our program and the installer MSI itself, but has no effect on the updater. If you can tell me what setting the updater gets its language value from, then we can tweak that setting to make sure it displays correctly in all of the languages we are shipping in.

[Cosmin]

Hi,

This will hopefully give us a high execution probability, to allow for the fact there is no "Run scheduled task as soon as possible after it is missed" option, but we will still only hit the server with an update query every couple of days.

We already have this option on our TODO list and it will be available in a future version. When configuring the updater as a scheduled task you will be able to use the "Run task as soon as possible after a scheduled start is missed" option.

we're testing on machines that are running Windows 7 installed as English (New Zealand), and English (US), then we are tweaking the language and regional settings to trigger the install and our application to change to a different language.

Like Bogdan mentioned, the Updater uses the system language. So if Windows is installed in English, English strings will be used. The user and system locale is ignored. The dialog buttons are localized automatically by Windows.

Regards,
Cosmin