I have learned more from this forum than I did when I was in college!! With the help from this forum I locked up a program for sale in access. Now I need little more Help.

What I want to do is copy my access program to a CD for sale. When this CD is inserted into a computer I want it to open an install wizard program. Then proceed with installing it.

                     What I need to know:

A. Can this be done with VBA?

B. an example of how get the computers attention just by inserting the CD. Then running my VBA program to start the install wizard user interface.

C. How to put whatever that commercial programs put in your register to prevent you from deleting their program and just reinstalling it to gain more time. So that the computer can detect your program has been installed on this machine once before.

D. How to disable the ctrl + shift key


Thanks for your help.

Mike Drumm

A hopeful beginner.

You said, "What I want to do is copy my access program to a CD for sale. When this CD is inserted into a computer I want it to open an install wizard program. Then proceed with installing it."

First, copying your Access database to a CD is fine, but the user needs to have a copy of Microsoft Access to run it. The Access Developer's Tool has a version of Microsoft Access called "Run-Time" that you can distribute freely with your database so users can use it without having a full version of Microsft Access on their computers. Otherwise, they're stuck because you cannot make an EXE file. The closest you can do is an MDE file.

Installation wizards like the kind you speak of are possible via a third party program. I don't know if you can do it via VBA within your database because the user would have to open the database itself to activate it. It's like putting the cart before the horse!

There are ways to disable the CTRL+SHIFT key. Check the archives here. I don't know it offhand.

Good luck!


Greg Serrano
Michigan Dept. of Environmental Quality, Air Quality Division

Whew, you are a beginner. How good is this app?

As to issue C., most cots create their own registry keys on installation, and then create a value in the registry for the expiration date. Your uninstall program should leave the registry value intact. This means that the first thing your installation program should do is check for this hidden registry value and if its there, not allow reinstallation if the demo period has passed.

These safeguards check a hidden value against the system date/time. The only way around them is to reset your system date/time to a time during the initial demo period.

As to issues A and B, what you need to do is create your installation file. That CAN be vbscript, not VBA. But what you will need to do is to put an Autorun.inf file on the cd. When you put a data CD into your cd rom drive, and the drive is set to atourun, the system looks for "autorun.inf" This file is a text file that tells the system which file to run first, like a boot.inf file. So it should look like this:

[autorun]
open=YourInstallFile.vbs -switches 'if any
icon=Optional.ico 'file on CD


So if you create this file:

autorun.inf
[autorun]
open=sample.vbs

Then this file:
sample.vbs
MsgBox "Hello World!"

Burn these two files to a cd, and then insert it into your cd drive. You should get a message box saying "Hello World!"

HTH





mmcdonal

I may have steered you wrong. In Windows XP SP2 I can't autoplay a .vbs file. I am looking into this.
Please also see www.advisor.com and the Access Advisor magazine for ads on installation products.

mmcdonal

check this out: http://www.utteraccess.com/forums/sh...b=5&o=&fpart=1

Boyd
"Hi Tech Coach"
Access Based Accounting/Business Solutions developer.
http://www.officeprogramming.com