Clicking the Full Installer menu option expands the Full Installation menu and displays the built-in Quick Help for that part of the program as shown here:
Note: Clicking any of the menu headers will display the Quick Help for that section of the program. This is just a quick overview of the section. More help is available by pressing F1 at any screen or from the Help menu.
General Settings
Clicking the General Settings menu option shows us this screen:
By default the Use Shared Information box is checked.
In this mode the release version and date are taken from the Shared values in the Project Profile General Settings screen. If you uncheck this box then you can enter different values that will be published ONLY for this installer type.
Note: No values are shown here for the Release Version or Release Date as these are taken from the Shared Information.
Automatic ZIP File Creation
Some corporations or firewalls prevent downloading of EXE versions of your installer. To get around this it is common to provide a ZIP version of your installer as an option. See the regular help for detailed information.
Installer Files
When you click this option on the side menu you will see the files that are associated with this installer type as shown here:
Publish Installer Files
As mentioned above, SetupCast has the ability to publish the actual files for your installers as well as the content that it generates. If this feature is enabled in the Project Profile General Settings, then it will be automatically checked when this installer type is added. You can uncheck this box if you do not want the installer files for this type of installer published.
Managing files
Note: If the box in the Project Profile General Settings is checked that tells SetupCast that the project is SetupBuilder related then you will not see these buttons!
Add Files - This button opens a file dialog that you can use to select the installer file to associate with this project. After a file is selected SetupCast knows where to get it for publishing. It also analyzes the size of that file to display in the generated content as the download size.
Note: The Full Installer type of distribution expects only one EXE file to be selected. Other types of installers expect one EXE file and (optionally) additional cluster files.
Delete Selected File - This button deletes a file selected from the list.
Clear All Files - This button clears the file list.
Refresh - This button totals the files in the list and updates the Total Bytes.
Total Bytes
SetupCast totals all the files in the list and displays the total here in Bytes.
Note: Tokens are available in the templates that allow you to display the total in Bytes, Kilobytes, Megabytes and Gigabytes.
After a file has been selected your screen will look like this:
File Publishing
This menu option displays a screen where you control the filenames and directory names on your webserver for this installer type.
Note: if you click this menu option before the Publish Settings are configured in the Project Profile, you will see errors as shown here:
Don't worry!
Once the Publish Settings are configured (telling SetupCast about your webserver) the URLs will be automatically generated for you.
For your First Project just leave the default filenames (more on that in the section on Publishing Your First Project).
Fixed Publishing
By default SetupCast uses Dynamic Publishing to organize related files in separate directories. It automatically merges information you enter in the Publish Settings with the directory and filenames for each content type. This information is used to create the URLs needed to upload the files and download them.
If you have an existing directory structure on your website that you want to keep you can use the Fixed Publish method to tell SetupCast where to upload the files and how to link to them. This method is not quite as automated as the Dynamic Publish method, but it does make it easy to use SetupCast with your existing website layout.
An example of using Fixed Publishing is shown here:
Release Notes
As mentioned earlier, Release Notes are a way for you to enter information that the end user can read on your website before downloading the installer or running the web update.
When you click this menu option SetupCast displays a screen where you can manage release notes for this installer type as shown here:
By default the "Use Shared Release Notes" option is checked and the release notes from the Project Profile section are used.
If you want to have release notes that are specific to this installer type, uncheck the box and enter them here.
Preview Content
The last step for your test project is to preview the generated content. When you click the Preview Content sidebar option in the Full Installer menu SetupCast takes the HTML template for this installer type and merges the generated data with it as shown here:
A word about the HTML templates...
The merge template above has a token that displays a image that represents your product. If you use a template with this option and have not selected a image (in the Project Profile) then a "No Image" placeholder is inserted in its place.
There are also merge templates that do not have an image in them as shown in the screen shot below.
Several different merge templates are provided with SetupCast. You are free to copy these and modify them or create your own. The templates are just simple documents with tokens in them to represent the data gathered in SetupCast.
This is the same merge template as the one used above, but without a product image.
Note: Clicking a link in the preview mode will display a dialog box that shows you exactly what URL it is linked to as shown here:
(note that since this tutorial is publishing to www.mydomain.com we have substituted another screen shot here)
That is all there is to it!
You have created a new SetupCast project, enabled publishing of your software distribution files, added some release notes and previewed the generated content.
Your next step is to Publish Your First Project.