Custom Action Overview¶
What are custom actions?¶
Custom actions are powerful features that extend the capabilities of standard actions provided by Paquet Builder; custom actions do not require special programming skills and let you customize the behavior of the package.
All custom actions are visually managed by the custom action editor explained in the Custom Action Manager topic. No scripting is required!
Paquet Builder's custom actions are objects that control the behavior of the package and uninstaller: each action actually executes a specific task it was designed for. For example you have actions that will display additional dialog boxes (user queries, readmes...); other that manipulate files or work with the Windows registry...
You have just to create a list of actions and Paquet Builder will do the rest of the job. Now these actions have properties: to customize the behavior of a given custom action, you will need to change its properties.
When are custom actions executed?¶
Actions are added to specific phases of the package's execution called events; Paquet Builder provides you with several events: Main Events such as Initialization, Before File Extraction, After File Extraction and Finalization; Dialog and Uninstaller-related events. When an event is triggered, its actions are executed in the order in which they appear in the event's action list.
Package-related events are executed in this order:
- Initialization
- After Welcome Screen
- After start readme screen
- Before File Extraction
- After File Extraction
- After Shortcut/Registry Creation
- After Setup Run (if a Package for a Setup is used)
- Before final screen
- Finalization
See the list of all custom actions available.
Important notes about custom actions¶
-
It is not necessary to work with actions: Paquet Builder's other steps already allow you to configure many facets of your package. However actions give you the total control over your package's behavior.
-
Paquet Builder only checks whether all required properties were filled when you add or edit new actions. It does not check whether the action will work correctly or not. For example, if you add a "Conditional Begin If/Then", do not forget to add the other part "Conditional End If" or the C code compiler will raise an exception.
-
You can add several actions that have the same properties: for example, if you need to execute the same file twice. Paquet Builder also supports actions that have the same names in the editor and in different events.
-
You can fill in the properties of the custom actions with variables and resource strings.
-
Important: once again, Begin Conditional If/Then must always be followed later by an End Conditional If/Then.
-
Some action properties are optional: when you discover a new action, please refer to the related Help topic before using it! Important information is available sometimes about the action properties. You can press the Help button that will display the help topic related to this action.
-
Some actions have no properties (like the Exit Package action). Consequently the Action Properties Editor is not displayed (double-clicking on these actions to edit them will do nothing).
-
To add comments to your action list, use the special "User comment" action.
Tip
Check the forum for help and samples related to custom actions.