Where should Addins_installed be?

[CALocklin]

What's going on? As of A5v8 I thought the Addins_installed folder was supposed to be under the Windows "Application Data" folder. That works fine in A5v8 but I just put my A5v9 addins there and A5v9 doesn't recognize them at all. I thought this new location was required because of Vista?

I put the Addins_installed folder back under my A5v9 executable folder and now they work fine!

Are others seeing this same thing?

[DaveM]

Re: Where should Addins_installed be?

Cal,
Maybe they fixeded it?
.

[Tim Kiebert]

Re: Where should Addins_installed be?

Cal,

This seemed to have changed again. On the weekend I installed the latest patch and my addins no longer worked. on investigation I found a new folder called 'Installations'. I placed the addins there and now they work again. I did not try placing them in the A5v9 executable folder.
Actual path is

...Application Data\Alpha Software\Alpha Five Version 9\Installations\DMyProgramsa5v9\addins_installed

Your path will be different according to where a5 is installed. ie the second last folder name.
I remember when v8 was in beta that for a while it also used the Installations folder. So if you have multiple installations on the same computer the info would be kept seperate.

[csda1]

Re: Where should Addins_installed be?

Cal,

What does the following do on your system/version?

?a5_getaddinsinstalledfolder()
= "C:\Program Files\A5V8\addins_installed"
?a5_getaddinsinstalledfolder("user")
= "C:\Documents and Settings\Ira\Application Data\Alpha Software\Alpha Five Version 8\Addins_Installed"
?a5.get_exe_name()
= "alpha5.exe"
?a5_getapplicationdatafolder()
= "C:\Documents and Settings\Ira\Application Data\Alpha Software\Alpha Five Version 8"
?a5.Get_Exe_Path()
= "C:\Program Files\A5V8"


How are you determining the path? Is it in your install or via Alpha?

[Selwyn Rabins]

Re: Where should Addins_installed be?

What's going on? As of A5v8 I thought the Addins_installed folder was supposed to be under the Windows "Application Data" folder. That works fine in A5v8 but I just put my A5v9 addins there and A5v9 doesn't recognize them at all. I thought this new location was required because of Vista?

I put the Addins_installed folder back under my A5v9 executable folder and now they work fine!

Are others seeing this same thing?

a5 looks for addins in two places.
first place is the addins_install folder in the executable. this is for addins that are installed by an installer that has permission to write to this folder.

then it also looks in the user addin folders.

the folder names can be seen in the Interactive window:

?A5_GetAddinsInstalledFolder("system")

?A5_GetAddinsInstalledFolder("user")

[CALocklin]

Re: Where should Addins_installed be?

Great! Now I have to go back and change every one of my addin installers and a few apps so they will look at the correct A5v9 "addins_installed" folder.

Yes, I know I probably should have checked using the A5_GetAddinsInstalledFolder() but, Selwyn, please remember when making changes to folder locations that many of us use 3rd party installers which means that folder changes can wreak havok with our installation routines. There was no reason to think it would change for A5v9 and there was nothing in the Help file or the Release Notes that mentioned the change.

For those who have my addins - sorry but it will be a few days before I can get them all updated, again.

[CALocklin]

Re: Where should Addins_installed be?

a5 looks for addins in two places.
first place is the addins_install folder in the executable. this is for addins that are installed by an installer that has permission to write to this folder.

then it also looks in the user addin folders.

.....

Just to avoid confusion, Selwyn listed both places but not necessarily in the order used. (Although, now that I think about it, that might be the order in v9 but it wasn't in v8.) If two different aex files with the same name (presumably one would be an update of the other) are placed so that one is in the "exe" addins_installed and the other is in the "user" addins_installed, the one in the "user" addins_installed will take precedence. At least this is the way it was in A5v8. It's late now and it takes awhile to run the test so I'll try to test it in v9 later this week.

I hope it continues to work this way in v9 and future versions. The most likely scenarios I can think of would either:
(A) put an "accidental" installation in the "exe" addins_installed folder because of updating an application from an earlier version of A5 or,
(B) put an original aex file in the "exe" folder then create an update designed to be run by anyone and put it in the "user" folder.

The only other problem I know of is getting A5 to update to the newest version because it doesn't seem to pay attention to the date of the aex file. Ira provided some possible solutions in a V8 thread:

A parameter to force the rebuild was added in a later version of a5v8 to a5_libraries_synchronize(). To force it, use

a5_libraries_synchronize(.T.)

However, I have found there are conditions that the rebuild does not happen. You can tell if it happened by looking at the file date/time stamp of Addin_library.aex To help the process along in version 8 and later, delete the file returned by

a5_getaddinlibrarylistfilename()

if it exists before the synchronize.

....

If you have this problem on your development machine, another solution is to go to the A5 Control Panel and click "Tools" / "Addin Manager" and uncheck one of your addins. Then close the dialog and re-open it, recheck the addin that was previously unchecked, and close the dialog again. This forces A5 to update all the addins.

It would be nice if automatically checking the date of the aex files could be added in a future update to A5. I, for one, am certainly not perfect enough to build addins that never need updating.

[csda1]

Re: Where should Addins_installed be?

Hi Selwyn,

There is a consistent solution that could be applied to help out installers from here forward.

All that is needed is to create a couple of registry keys (and tell programmers about them) that contain the locations that installers need to know about, e.g. exe name & path, addins path, application data path. With these values, the installer could read and properly write to the correct directories.


Hi Cal,

Although it is a big overhead, it is possible to run some code on startup of Alpha Five, that saves these values to a file that the installer could use. Kind of using a sledge hammer where a hammer would do, but it would always work.