OpenCPN Beta Version 3.3.1824 Released

[rgleason]

Web based selection, download and install.

User Selection of items to install:

Html select fields with dropdown:
HTML Tutorial - Select
Html checkbox fields
HTML Tutorial - Checkboxes

Have a button on the bottom "Continue, download and install" which initiates the download and execution
of each item checked in sequential order.


Download

The code would be a little different than this, but similar. ( -Haven't figured it all out yet.)
How to trigger a file download when clicking an html button or javascript - Stack Overflow
best answer. You can trigger a download by using the new HTML5 download attribute.

<a href="path_to_file" download="proposed_file_name">Download</a>

Where :
path_to_file is either an absolute or relative path,
proposed_file_name the filename to save to (can be blank, then defaults to the actual filename).

HTML a download Attribute
Note:The download attribute is not supported in earlier versions ofIE, Safari or Opera.
Seems to work in my IE7 and Firefox current version.

HTML5 download Attribute
..and when the user clicks the link, the download attribute appears in the save dialog instead of the garbled mess that was there before. In this case, the file will be downloaded as expenses.pdf. The download attribute also triggers a force download, something that I used to do on the server side with PHP
How to execute the file once downloaded
Need to work on this a bit.

Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.

[rgleason]

Please see this page for an example of Windows Install portion:
http://tgp-architects.com/Opencpn-Fi...tall-HTML.html

This is incomplete, with no formatting or CSS, and has not been validated.
I am unsure about proper security etc, if we can make this download and execute.
No experience with this part.

Html file is attached. Dowload, remove doc and load file in your browser to see.
Don't know if this is along the lines you are suggesting.

[rgleason]

For installing User Selections of the various programs it appears we could use the mingw-get.exe XML based installer with the user selections being entered into an XML file, and then the XML file is used by the mingw-get.exe to download and execute in the correct order.

We would just have to modify the web base selections to become xml format and to save the xml file somewhere on the users machine? Then point the mingw-get program to that file somehow?

Since this is GNU software we can use it. I have not looked into this possibility very much but I think it might work.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/Installer/
Here is the description from the Readme.doc
Description
-----------

mingw-get is a tool to assist users in the management of MinGW and MSYS
software installations. Configured via an online XML database, which is
managed by the project maintainers, it offers a choice of graphical and
command line driven user interfaces facilitating selective download and
installation of packages provided by the project.

The XML database provides maintainers with a mechanism for the
specification of inter-package dependencies; this permits configuration
of any package, such that the end user may elect to install just that
specific package, leaving mingw-get to ensure that all dependencies will
be automatically satisfied at installation time.

[rgleason]

Modularized Packaging by Pavel
https://github.com/OpenCPN/OpenCPN/pull/151

Thankyou Pavel!