Installer plug-ins and package installation commands

Package installation commands

Examples

Package installation commands

Software package downloads are handled completely by built-in Service Agent functionality. Because installation varies depending on the platform and device, the Service Agent uses an "installer plug-in" to process the installation. The commands specified for a software package depend on the installer plug-in and will vary from plug-in to plug-in. The table below defines the package installation commands.

NOTE: The failure of any command will halt the package processing.

Installer plug-in and package installation commands

The default installer plug-in provided by Questra with the Service Agent is the Standard Installer, a shared library (DLL) designed to work on supported Windows NT family and UNIX-like systems. The Service Agent Standard Installer preprocesses the package Install, Pre-, Post-, and Activate commands and sends them to the system command interpreter (the Bourne shell for UNIX-like systems and, generally speaking, CMD.EXE on Windows).

Commands that can be used at the command interpreter may be used by the package installation commands. Multiple commands may be used simply by inserting the command interpreter command separator in each of the commands.

The preprocessing performed is string substitution for the following keywords:

• PKGFILE – The absolute path to the software package file that contains the new software components and the installation ”program."

• PKGDIR – The absolute path to the directory where the software package is located.

• DEVICENAME – The name of the device that is the target of the installation.

• SWDDIR – The absolute path to the base directory of the software repository for the target device. The contents of the software repository include a ”bin" directory where Questra SoftwareDirector-related tools might be installed.

• PKGID – The Enterprise-generated ID of the package to be installed.

• REQID – The Enterprise-generated ID of the package distribution request.

NOTE: Make sure you consider spaces in path and directory names, including those that are substituted using the keywords.

The return codes of the commands are interpreted by the Service Agent Standard Installer and translated into return codes to the Service Agent. The interpretation of the command return codes varies depending on which commands they are. The return codes for the package commands have the meanings in the following tables.

Service Agent Standard Installer return codes for the Install and Activate commands

Service Agent Standard Installer return codes for all other commands

Examples

To illustrate the package installation commands that might be used with the Service Agent Standard Installer, consider the following two examples.

Example 1: In this example, the Service Agent Update feature is used to update the Service Agent itself on a Windows XP system, and automatically clean up the package file. To perform this operation, the package commands in below would be used.

Example 2: In this example, a fictitious installation program handles all phases of the installation process for a UNIX system. To perform this operation, the package commands below would be used.