Installer Progress Report

Hello, and happy Labor Day! I've been delayed in my "final post" due to a few reasons. First, I thought the deadline was Wednesday but it turned out to be Friday. Then, Friday I made my submission and worked with the guys a bit over a GoToMeeting session (very cool) to address some small issues with the installer, particularly the issues with Tomcat and environment variables. I spent the better half of the evening Friday addressing those issues, adding in the changes, and beginning to test them.

• We now create a net user account for OpenMRS, and this is the account that Tomcat is run as. This solves the issue of the environment variable because we will now copy the properties file to "C:\Documents And Settings\openmrs\Application Data\OpenMRS" where "openmrs" is the net user account we create. The WAR file knows to look here for the properties file, so prior to a reboot it will be able to locate it here in a hard coded fashion, and then after a reboot the updates to the environment variable will be visible to Tomcat and it can resolve the location from there.
• For now, you can no longer change the name of the webapp. This is sort of tied into the environment variable issue in that the naming convention for the properties file variable is that is should be prefixed with the webapp name. This is an issue because if the user does in fact change it to something other than "openmrs", then the WAR file can't find it.
• Due to bullet point one, there is no "Reboot Required" dialog since we are circumventing the environment variable issue.

The one last issue I'm having with this is that the password for the net user account isn't getting stored properly and Tomcat is failing to start under the rights of our newly created net user. I didn't get a change to get as far into this as I'd have liked to due some unexpected events over this holiday weekend, but after some testing I believe it may just be an error within BitRock or my script, rather than something more annoying relating to the actual service configuration. Once I get that ironed out I can upload another iteration of this installer.

Also, I've been working with BitRock to resolve a tiny bug in the dependency checking code. I've had 3-4 correspondences with them over the past 4 days, and we are trying to figure out why the bug is occuring. It deals with the drop-down boxes for selecting the MySQL / Tomcat installations the user would like to use for OpenMRS as detected by the dependency checker. Once the user selects one and then hits next, if they were to hit the "Back" button and drop the box down again, they'd see an additional 2 empty lines in the box. That isn't really holding me up much as I'm trying to complete these new additions /changes with respect to the webapp, environment variable, and net user account in the naive installer before diving back into the smart installer.

I hope to have an update for you within a few days, so until then take care!