an interesting challenge

[Terry Judd]

On 14/01/10 2:57 PM, "Derek" <runrev at gmx.com> wrote:

I think we're running into problems with indents so hopefully this remains
readable...

>> There was some discussion over the last couple of days about the potential
>> evils of Flash shared objects but I guess you could use them to your
>> advantage in this case. If you included a small Flash object on the
>> referring page that created a shared object with a name that reflected its
>> relationship to both your standalone and the host website then you could
>> get the downloaded Rev standalone to check for its existence amongst all the
>> other shared objects when it started up for the first time.
>> 
>Would that be better than a browser cookie? Would I still have to scan all the
>browser folders on their computer?

There are designated (platform specific) locations for shared objects to be
stored (check the mail archives for the last few days because I'm sure
someone posted them previously) so you wouldn't need to do much scanning -
some relatively simple code within a switch statement based on the platform
and systemversion functions and utilising the defaultfolder property should
do the trick.
 
>> Still far from ideal and will definitely fail if the user downloads on one
>> computer and installs on another. Seems like what you really want is a
>> server-based routine that packages (zips) the standalone with a text file
>> containing the required information on the fly and delivers the customised
>> version to the user.
>> 
> That is a great suggestion... then all Revolution needs to do is search
> their whole hard drive for the file (different people choose to download
> things to different places), and hopefully not run into permissions
> problems, and hopefully the user won't delete it before launching the
> standalone.
> 

Well if your program consists of a folder containing the application and
various other folders/components then I don't think you'd have any problem
with an additional (temporary) text file getting 'lost' or the application
finding the file when it first launched. If however your program has to
consist of the application and nothing else then you'd need to somehow write
the info into the application on the server side before you zip it for
download. I guess this would be relatively straightforward for Mac apps as
they are folders anyway but not sure how you'd go about it with Win apps.
Perhaps you could find a bit of redundant/little used text within the binary
code (there are bits and pieces that are human readable) that you could
write your string to for later extraction.

Terry...