Suite Style Problems

[rguggisberg]

Someone from InstallShield,
There seem to be a fair number of bugs in the styles. If you try to set a gradient it clobbers the colors of other sections. Is this a known problem?
If not, I can provide steps to make it mess up... there seem to be so many ways to goof up the colors of a neighboring section.
If this is a known problem, when will there be a fix?

[#2]

Could you clarify a little more on what you mean specifically? Just to help me pinpoint the problem and make sure it's something we know about 🙂

[rguggisberg]

Did you try using styles?
Below are some examples, but I will caution you that it is so screwed up that the results are not even the same when I attempted to verify the info below.

Start with a Solid Brush Header, Body and Footer with a color of C00000 (color probably does not matter… other than use something other than black and white because that is what it reverts to).
Set Text color for all to FFFFFF.

1. Now change the Body Brush type to Vertical gradient
Observe that the Start Color goes to 000000 and the Stop color goes to FFFFFF in the style window but not in the Wizard page window.

2. Now change the Body Vertical gradient to Start color of C00000 and Stop Color of FFFFFF.
Observe that the style window is correct but there is no gradient in the Wizard page window.

3. Now change the Header Brush type to Vertical gradient
Observe that the info in the style window is correct but the header the Wizard page window is black and there is still no gradient in the Wizard page window.

4. Now change the Header Footer Brush type to Vertical gradient
Observe that the info in the style window shows Start color of 000000 and Stop Color of FFFFFF. The Header and Body Style windows are still what you previously entered. But the Wizard page windows are all black and there are now gradients on the Body and the footer.

5. Now change the Footer Brush type to Solid and the color to FFFFFF and change the Header text color to 000000.
Observe that the info in the style window is correct and the header is correct in the Wizard page windows, but the top line of the text in the Body has gone to black… the color we just set for Header text.

You results may vary from 1 iteration to the next.
There may very well be many other ways to mess this up… at this point it is not usable.
Do you want me to submit an issue under our maintenance contract?
When might this get fixed?

[#4]

Ah. The issue is the following:

The intended behavior is that changing a brush from a solid to any form of gradient results in the gradient list being cleared out and all information related to coloring being deleted. The error you're seeing is because a particular piece of back-end data isn't cleared out as required when switching away from a gradient type. This causes corrupted data to be pushed in to the front-end, which causes the eventual issues you're seeing.

As a temporary workaround, if you change a brush to a gradient and subsequently save, close, and re-open the project before making any further changes then you'll see the correct behavior.

I've created WO IOA-000065889 for this problem. I'm not sure when a fix will be available.

[rguggisberg]

Bryan,
Well that may make some difference. Still am not able to put a gradient on the Body. The Body seems to take on the properties of the Footer... even though I change one thing at a time and save and exit between changes. I am going to give up on that for now and hope that I am not asked to use the gradient.

Since you now have me exiting and restarting... that brings up another annoyance. The FlexNet Connect Agent pegs my processor for over a minute each time I start IS. Please tell me how to disable that... seems like someone at Flexera told me how to do that a long time ago. FNC is rather annoying anyway. Every few days it reminds me that "IS 2012 is now available" even though I have been running IS2012 for some time and have told FNC to "Not remind me anymore".

[#6]

Can you post or PM your project file? I'll be happy to take a look. I was able to reproduce the issue you described and, I imagine, it's possible there's some other corruption in your project file.

Have you set the following option to "Never"?
Tools->Options->Updates->"InstallShield Software Updates"

If you have already done so and are still seeing this issue, please let me know.

[rguggisberg]

Bryan,
Thanks for giving me my CPU back 🙂
"InstallShield Software Updates" was set to every 30 days. I changed it to Never and FCN is not hogging my CPU anymore.

I have attached my project. I suspect you are right and will find corruption. This is just a start... so I don't mind starting over... other than how do I avoid corruption of the next project file?

While you are at it... no one has responded to my other post where I explained that I can't drop an entire folder structure into a 'Packages' folder. What am I overlooking there?

Thanks,
Ron

[#8]

I'm glad to see you're having a better experience 🙂

Anyway, I looked at your project file and didn't see any corruption. The one thing I did notice is that the "Footer" style is associated explicitly with all the Wizard Pages as the body background. I don't believe this is totally intended. Could this be why you're seeing the strange behaviors? Normally, you can associate the standard body background in the Wizard Pages node, which it appears you've customized, but that is ignored if a value is specified in the body background property for a given page.

The other thing I noticed is that you have a path to the ico file listed in the header image section. Unfortunately, I think this is just an area where it's not as clear as it should be what you should enter. I would suggest dropping down the combo box and selecting "Frontier.ico" from the list ( it appears you added it via support files ). I'm guessing you copied the path to the file on your dev box in to that field and, instead of adding it for you, the field just happily accepts it. I created WO IOA-000065941 for this issue.

Otherwise, I don't see anything else that should cause you problems aside from what we previously discussed. I've re-attached the updated and modified version that fixes the two aforementioned issues. For your convenience, I have updated the project file's Body brush style to be a vertical gradient going from black -> white at (0,0) to (100,100) for you. You should be able to see this correctly. Please let me know if that's not the case 🙂

[rguggisberg]

Thanks Bryan,
I agree with your 1st and 3rd paragraph. However you lost me in your 2nd paragraph. What do you mean when you say "in the header image section"? Are you talking about in the 'Wizard Interface' under Styles?
I need to get to the right place before I can see the 'Combo Box' you are referring to. What part of the menu tree are you referencing?

[#10]

Sorry, I used the word section when I should have written ( and meant ) field. So if you go in to the Wizard Pages node in the dialog editor ( the node in which you land when you visit the Wizard Interface node ). From there, look at the option "Header Image" under "Wizard Header Options".

The combo box dropdown will be on the right-hand side when you select that box next to a browse ellipsis.

[rguggisberg]

🙂
Ok that is clear now! Looks like you already changed that for me and at this point it did not really matter because I was using a gradient instead of an image in the header anyway. Waiting for our marketing type people to give me some direction on what they want this to look like. So I think I am ok for now with the issues in this post.
Thanks Again!

[#12]

Glad to hear you were able to get through the problems. Thanks for letting us know the issues you encountered.