Solved QtIFW: Notify user about new packages
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Hi
I have created an online installer with the Qt installer framework (version 2.0.5) for my application. On user request my application checks using QProcess with "maintenancetool.exe --checkupdates" for available updates. That works quiet alright.
What I would like to do now is to also inform the user about new packages which weren't available before. I have added the new package to the repository and starting maintenancetool.exe in package management mode shows the new package. Is there a way to get information about new packages similar to the --checkupdates switch?Regards,
Volker
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Hi and welcome to devnet forum
As a note, the responses to Qt IFW are typically very scarse here.
Your question is quite interesting. On the other side how should that work?
Your customers may be distributed world-wide. Your repository you are probably keeping somewhere on a website. If this website shall inform all installations of your SW, it needs to where those (IP address?) are. Therefore, you would need to have a database with all installations. The check cannot be done only once, since it is not ensured that all users are online at the same time. You want to inform only once and not again when the update has been done. Probably those are only a couple of thoughts on requirements and thre might be more.
Therefore, it is probably more efficient to send emails to users for information.
Another options is that your application is checking on a regular basis for updates, e.g. when it is started. Alternatively, when your app runs 24/7 you can start your update check with QTimer. In summary all this seems more efficient.
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Thanks for the quick reply.
I agree to your explanations, thus I check on application start up if a new update is available using the maintenance tool program. As I mentioned previously, this works alright. However, my problem is that maintenancetool.exe returns empty / no output on standard out with switch --checkupdtaes if only a new package is added to the repository and no update has been made to other - existing - packages.
I am looking for a solution where maintenancetool.exe returns a list of package names on standard output when packages have been added to the repository since last time maintenancetool.exe checked for updates. -
Sorry, I understood a bit different.
A new package could be announced with a readme file. However, that's a bit awkward.
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Could you elaborate? I guess you mean to propagate the README as an update and inform the user in the README about the availability of a new package? Sure, that'll do as well.
Are there an means in Qt IFW to open a readme when a new update is available? -
You might face the problem only once, if you have no readme file with some details of updates for the new updated version. Since you are checking from your application anyhow, you can parse the file and display possible information.
So far I have done only a few things with IFW, so my knowledge is limited. However, I added also some data folder structure which shall be installed along with the applications. There you could add or simply have some information file. I would need to check on another machine, how it was done
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Hi @koahnig
thanks for your advice! I think I'll implement something like you suggested.