Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Clutter Free installs

There was a known problem with an undocumented solution. After reading the solution of a different, unrelated issue, I tried to use part of this to solve my first problem. It worked.

I'm not going to get into too many details, but the solution included a two step installation of an ODBC-driver before generating an ODBC source with the newly installed driver. The two steps of the installation was the loading a registry file and adding a directory to the global path.

I documented the installation in a MindMap file. And not just any MindMap file. I added it in a Clutter Free Enterprise configuration mind map, using three functions that did not yet exist: Registry, Path and ODBC.

Modifying large portions of the registry can look disgusting unless it's kept in a tree structure, so I added a branch in the MindMap for registry entries. Hence, the command "Registry ODBC Driver" will simply pick the "ODBC Driver" branch from the "Registry" tree, instead of having to list every single key/value pair as separate commands.

The "Path" function adds to the global Path environment variable in the registry and sends a message to all windows applications to reload the environment. This makes the change instant.

And finally, "ODBC" adds system DSNs by format "ODBC driver name;param=value;param=value" etc.

In combination with switches to automatically load this specific configuration file and run the specific solution before automatically quitting, allowed me to set up a shortcut for self help whenever someone new is lacking the driver and ODBC-source.