Putting together a NSIS installer. (first time)
Currently, a manual step in our install is to make a URL connection to a database, and save a basic connection properties file to a folder under Tomcat.
To aid this, we currently use a small JAR application that helps the user build this connection property file.
It has built in functionality to try and ping the DB.
It aids users by having a drop down to choose different db vendors/versions, and thus helping with building the URL.
In my mockup, ideally, I wanted something that did away with the JAR app and have this component built into the installer. Something like this:
I already know that I will need to create a custom page for this, (will use something like NSISDialogDesigner to assist with this).
The bit that I am unsure about, is the best approach for pinging the database from NSIS to ensure a correct URL/credentials has been supplied, and to return the errors back to the custom page.
What would be the best approach for implementing this functionality within a NSIS installer?
For background, once I have achieved this, a later step will be to create a database by running some SQL scripts I have.
Just thinking ahead, I guess which database vendor/version they have, will depend on which sql script to run. Im thinking that if the user chooses e.g. SQL Server 2005 on this page, this could be writen to a variable to use later when choosing the right sql script.
The best way of pulling this off is to write a helper commandline application which you should run invisibly in the background and then check the exit code for success or failure. This helper app can be Java, C++, C#, or anything, whatever you’re comfortable with. I’ve worked on several very large NSIS deployments and we had maybe 10 – 20 such tools launched during different phases of setup. For single WIN32 API calls, NSIS provides a P/Invoke-like wrapper, but for anything even remotely complicated, helper apps are the way to go.