I've been reading through Inno Setup documentation and got confused about why do we specify the path in ExtractTemporaryFiles
function if according to the documentation it extracts the files matching the wildcard specified by Pattern from the [Files]
section to a temporary directory.? If we have this Source: "Readme.txt"; Flags: dontcopy
in the [Files]
section why do we type ExtractTemporaryFiles('{tmp}\Readme.txt')
in the [Code]
section? Is that a mistake or I just don't understand how this function works? The same applies to the ExtractTemporaryFile
procedure.
Here's the code from ExtractTemporyFile
page:
[Files]
Source: "Readme.txt"; Flags: dontcopy noencryption
[Code]
function InitializeSetup: Boolean;
var
S: AnsiString;
begin
// Show the contents of Readme.txt (non Unicode) in a message box
ExtractTemporaryFile('Readme.txt');
if LoadStringFromFile(ExpandConstant('{tmp}\Readme.txt'), S) then
begin
MsgBox(S, mbInformation, MB_OK);
end;
Result := True;
end;
And here's the code from ExtractTemporaryFiles
page:
[Files]
Source: "Readme.txt"; Flags: dontcopy
Source: "MyProg.exe"; DestDir: "{app}"
Source: "MyProg.chm"; DestDir: "{app}"
[Code]
function InitializeSetup: Boolean;
var
S: AnsiString;
ResultCode: Integer;
begin
// Show the contents of Readme.txt (non Unicode) in a message box
ExtractTemporaryFiles('{tmp}\Readme.txt');
if LoadStringFromFile(ExpandConstant('{tmp}\Readme.txt'), S) then
begin
MsgBox(S, mbInformation, MB_OK);
end;
// Extract all MyProg files and launch it. Note how {app} is left unexpanded.
ExtractTemporaryFiles('{app}\MyProg.*');
ExecAsOriginalUser(ExpandConstant('{tmp}\')+'{app}\MyProg.exe', '', '',
SW_SHOWNORMAL, ewWaitUntilTerminated, ResultCode);
Result := True;
end;
In the first case we have:
[Files]
Source: "Readme.txt"; Flags: dontcopy noencryption
[Code]
ExtractTemporaryFile('Readme.txt');
And in the second one we have:
[Files]
Source: "Readme.txt"; Flags: dontcopy
[Code]
ExtractTemporaryFiles('{tmp}\Readme.txt');
What's the difference between those two? (noencryption
flag does not count)
Why do we need to specify the {tmp}
constant in the second case if we already extracting from there? In order to be able to use those methods correctly I need to have a clear understanding of the syntax.
The specific answer to your question:
Why do we type
ExtractTemporaryFiles('{tmp}\Readme.txt')
in the[Code]
section?
The {tmp}
reference in the ExtractTemporaryFiles
example code is apparently required for the ExtractTemporaryFiles
function, although this is undocumented. The {tmp}
reference is not present in the documentation sample code for the ExtractTemporaryFile
procedure:
[Files]
Source: "Readme.txt"; Flags: dontcopy noencryption
[Code]
function InitializeSetup: Boolean;
var
S: AnsiString;
begin
// Show the contents of Readme.txt (non Unicode) in a message box
ExtractTemporaryFile('Readme.txt');
if LoadStringFromFile(ExpandConstant('{tmp}\Readme.txt'), S) then
begin
MsgBox(S, mbInformation, MB_OK);
end;
Result := True;
end;
The only differences that I can see between ExtractTemporaryFile
and ExtractTemporaryFiles
are:
ExtractTemporaryFile
only extracts one file and has no return value
ExtractTemporaryFiles
extracts filenames based on a wildcard, and returns type integer
(number of files extracted), and apparently requires a directory name prefix to disambiguate the filename(s) being extracted (although this is not documented)