Question

I wrote a program in Java that makes it easy to setup and switch between different versions of Minecraft. The program is pretty much done, but I’m faced with a problem that I can’t seen to find the solution for. I have a button in the program that allows you to launch Minecraft by means of the Runtime object. This works well on my computer because I know where I have my .app or .exe file (depending on OS). I don’t however know where that file is located on anyone else’s computer. I have thought of a few ways of getting around this, but none seem to be feasible.

One idea was to just prompt the user to locate the file through a file chooser and then cache that file. This would work, but isn’t very elegant, especially for users that aren’t very computer literate.

I also thought about bundling the .app and .exe file with my application but that brought up even more problems. For one, I don’t know if it’s exactly legal for me to be distributing that file with my application. Also, it would change the way I would have to distribute my application to include some sort of installer that sets up everything.

Does anyone have any better ideas on how to handle this problem?

Answer 1

You have at least three choices that I can think

1. You can use a configuration system to store the location(s) of the program and prompt the user/supply a config API to set the value. This is good and rather simple to do
2. You can search commonly well know locations for the location and if it’s not found, prompt the user (and hopefully store the result). This is okay, but it relies on a number of factors, including the OS and the program actually being loaded in a “common” location and being named in a “common” manner.
3. Search the hard drive. This is poor as it’s time consuming and the application might not actually exist on the drive you are search…Searching all available locations could lead you onto network drives which will just be slower…And prompt the user if it’s not found

Seen as almost all the solutions fail to “prompt the user” I would probably use a combination of 1 & 2. Allow the user to specify the location, if they don’t, search some common known locations and if you still can’t find it, prompt the user (and hopefully save the value for reuse).

IMHO