DeployFox automates the steps required to deploy your applications by providing a customizable list of tasks: copy files, rename files, build a project into an EXE, digitally sign an EXE, run an Inno Setup script to create an installer, upload files to an FTP site, and so on.
I released a new version today that adds a new capability: templates. I have several applications that have nearly identical DeployFox projects: Stonefield Query for AccountMate, Stonefield Query for Alere, Stonefield Query for Sage 300, and several others. By creating DeployFox variables, I made the tasks more generic. For example, the Copy SFQuery.CHM task, which every application's DeployFox project has, copies {$ProjectFolder}\HTMLHelp\sfquery.chm to {$ProjectFolder}. $ProjectFolder contains the folder where the application is located so the task is the same for every application. For those tasks that have different settings, I have an INI file containing the values for those settings for the current project, read those values into DeployFox variables, and then use those variables for the setting values.Because all of the applications use almost the same set of tasks, when I recently changed one of the tasks, I had to do it in the DeployFox project for each application. I realized that having a common set of tasks would make that much easier, so the idea of templates was born.
I now have a DeployFox project called DeploymentTemplate. Each of the applications uses tasks from that project: the ones shown in green in the image below. The settings for a task that comes from a template can't be edited except the Active and Order values. To edit the other settings for a task, do in it the template project.
This new feature will save me a lot of time if I need to change any tasks in future releases of Stonefield Query versions.
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