Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

has anybody used PerlMSI which comes with Perl Dev Kit. In ScriptGenerator.pl I add following code to create a shortcut. 
$installer->SetShortcut('ProgramMenuFolder/Digest/f06Digest',
                        'Digest/Digest.exe');

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It creates the shortcut but when I run Digest.exe file, the exe file starts but does not continue. I had a look at the properties of the shortcut and realised that "Start In" property was empty. When I fill "Start In" entry with correct path the exe file starts. So My question is how can I set the "Start In" property of the shortcut from PerlMSI. I don't expect a reply. I know there aren't many people out there who use PerlMSI. But I just wanted to try, because I could not get any help from www.activestate.com.

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Re: Active Perl Dev Kit
by tachyon (Chancellor) on Nov 10, 2002 at 13:59 UTC

    If you check out the source of MSI::Installer.pm's SetShortcut() method and you will see: 

        
$self->{msi_db}->AddData(Shortcut => [ 
                                 {'Shortcut' => StrToUKey($target_file
+), 
                                  'Directory_' => $dir_key, 
                                  'Name' => $shortcut_name, 
                                  'Component_' => $component, 
                                  'Target' => $Feature, 
                                  'Arguments' => $argument_str, 
                                  'Description' => 'Description', 
                                  'Hotkey' => undef, 
                                  'Icon_' => undef, 
                                  'IconIndex' => undef, 
                                  'ShowCmd' => undef, 
                                  'WkDir' => undef, 
                                 }],

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    If you have a look here you will see the property names associated with shortcuts objects in VBS. You can see the WorkingDirectory property. I strongly suspect that 'WkDir' in the above code corresponds to this. So just hack the Installer.pm source to take a 4th arg and use it to set 'WkDir'. With a bit of luck it should work. For reference here is a VBS example of creating shortcuts which shows you the object property names. In a worst case you could always run something like this to generate the required shortcut. 

    ' Get a Shell object
Dim WSHShell
Set WSHShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

' Create a shortcut object 
Dim MyShortcut
Set MyShortcut = WSHShell.CreateShortcut("C:\Temp\Shortcut.lnk")

' Set shortcut object properties and save it
MyShortcut.TargetPath = "\\server\xyz\foo.exe"
MyShortcut.WorkingDirectory = "\\server\xyz"
MyShortcut.WindowStyle = 4
MyShortcut.Save

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    cheers

    tachyon

    s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print

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Re: Active Perl Dev Kit
by Jenda (Abbot) on Nov 10, 2002 at 16:49 UTC
[reply]
      Thanks to everbody who responded. I have finally managed to get it working. My application was under Digest folder. Under Digest there were images folder and when I run digest.exe from the shortcut it could not start because it could not locate the images. 
      Digest/digest.exe
Digest/images/digest.ico
Digest/images/digest_1.gif
Digest/images/digest_2.gif

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      I have put following code in ScriptGenerator.pl and it worked (I did not need to specify where the images were). This method of creating shortcut tells windows where to "Start In" : 
      $installer->AddData(Shortcut => [
                                {
                Shortcut    => "DIGEST_DIGEST.EXE",
                Directory_  => "PROGRAMMENUFOLDER_DIGEST",
                Name        => "Digest|Digest",
                Component_  => "Digest_Digest.exe",
                Target      => "TOP_FEATURE",
                Arguments   => undef,
                Description => 'digest.exe',
                Hotkey      => undef,
                Icon_       => undef,
                IconIndex   => undef,
                ShowCmd     => undef,
                WkDir       => "DIGEST",
                                 },
                ],
);

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