Billboard duration configurable?

[Scorp84]

Hello,

I want to know, if there's a way to set the duration for billboard rotation. By default, the time for one board is very long. Maybe it can be tweaked inside a Install Anywhere config file? In the IDE there isn't such an option. Hope you can help me.

[pv7721]

AFAIK, the billboard display duration is related to the progress bar (i.e. I cannot vouch for this to be the exact way of working, I'm reproducing it from my memory (the old forums are no longer available, so I cannot verify it 🙂
Basically, the installer will count the number of billboards available and the progress will be divided by this number (i.e. suppose you have 3 billboards, each and every one will be displayed for 1/3rd of the total time the progress bard needs to display from left to right). Then, there are methods in the API with which you can control the progress bar, so maybe if at moments you make it pause for a while, then the respective billboards will be displayed for a longer time.

[Scorp84]

Thanks for fast the reply. I will take a look on the api javadoc. Maybe I can find some methods related to the billboards. At the moment only 2 of my 4 billboards are displayed during the installation. Therefore I want to shorten the display duration for each one.

[pv7721]

Well, there might be another thing, though: in a certain IA version (but older I guess) the progress bar didn't behave the same way when things were installed in a different order. I remember that between two versions (of our products) I decided to reorganize in an alphabetic order the installed items, in order to be easier for me to spot missing things. However, this reorganization had a disastrous effect on the progress bar (I think this was mostly related with installation of .zip archives and speedfolders, where it is a little harder to calculate the time taken, so how much should the progress bar progress), while in the previous version it worked ok, in the current version after the reorganization, the progress bar stayed long at the left position and only towards the end of the installation it rapidly progressed, thus I had the same issue you now have: only 2 of 4 billboards were displayed... Maybe you encountered some sort of regression (or maybe a different organization of the installed items could help?)

[Scorp84]

I have exactly that issue. The progress bar stays for a long time below 10% or less. Therefore I wrote a customcodeaction that calls the setProgressPercentage() method. I placed this action behind long install tasks, but it seems, that the method has no effect on the progressbar. Any ideas?

[pv7721]

Have you tried reordering install items around?

[Scorp84]

That is not possible for me. I must have exact that order, because it's a update process. I can't simply reorder tasks within the install sequence.

[pv7721]

I agree that it might be trickier in an update sequence (say you need to stop service x y z, backup some files etc.) but when you're at pure installation, you install files a b c d, speedfolders e f g h and unzip a bunch of .zip files... changing the order of these between themselves (say you start by unzipping first, for instance, is this not possible?)

[amitaks2]

AFAIK billboard is animated gif file and bundel of jpeg files.
However you can create your desired gif file online.

[pv7721]

amitaks2, I'm afraid you mix up two different things:
1. If you don't want to run into issues, you can indeed use a single animated .gif file that will be displayed during installation, and where the timing has been defined inside the .gif file (I think this is the method used by IA installer itself!)
2. You can use several different file images (like .gif (non-animated or animated, why not, .jpeg etc.) that are displayed at install time. The time each image is displayed is calculated based on the progress bar, but that means that you rely on something you don't always have control on, thus the initial issue of this thread!