ALP Deployment of ALP applications with ALPFrame
This page describes how to deploy ALP applications with ALPFrame without installing the ALP first. If you are going to install your application on the target machine  and ALP engine beside it - then the limitations mentioned here are not applicable for your application - you can use ALPFrame as a host by creating the appropriate shortcut or URL - see also ALPFrame command line.

ALPFrame redistribution package (available for the registered customers) has the following structure:

Its root directory contains ALPFrame.exe and alpframe.cfg files.

ALP engine and supporting components are in the ComonFiles subdirectory of the package.

To pack your application using that package create a subfolder for it and place entire tree of your application in it. Use alp.site file to mark that directory as site root for the application. This file can be empty, but registered users should place their license in it. All the alp.xxx files are in your application tree thus in most cases (if you have prepared that files before creating deployment package) you do not need to do anything more than coping its directory tree in the created subfolder.

Then you need to take a look over the alpframe.cfg file. You can change the start page by editing the (string)HomePage option in the alpframe.cfg. For example if you have created a subfolder named myapp and your start page is start.asp - you can set that option to myapp/start.asp. If your application has a default document you can just set the value to the name of the subfolder (see also alp.directory for information how you can specify the default documents for a given site).

The package also contains in its root folder sample autorun.inf file and a page used as start page - mostly useful to test the package consistency. If you are not going to deploy your application as an auto-run CD you can delete the autorun.inf file or you can edit it to change some settings (such as the icon and disc label). If you are packaging several applications in one - for example by putting them in a separate subfolders then probably you will want to create a page that displays a list of choices to the user - you can replace the sample start page (default.htm) with yours instead of deleting it and changing the HomePage in the alpframe.cfg.

Adding additional ActiveX components to the application.

If you want to make available additional ActiveX components for your ASP pages in the packaged applications - then you will need to list them in the alpframe.cfg file. See the ActiveX list in the alpframe.cfg page for the syntax description. Also your components must be able to load their type libraries directly without accessing the registry - how to do that? See the code snippets section on our site for the extended typeinfo holder class for ATL. The sample contains information how to use the class in your ATL components. If the development tool used to create ActiveX-es doesn't allow such a technique then unfortunately you have no choice - you must install them on the user's system. If you are trying to minimize the installation UI and size you can use the ALPInstall utility instead of some of the larger and powerful installation programs.

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