Pushing configuration changes to writers

[dcramer]

Hi there,
I'm configuring oXygen for our local needs and will probably add a customized version of the DocBook framework. I can see that most of the config is stored (on Windows XP) in ~/Application Data/com.oxygenxml/oxyAuthorOptionsSa12.0.xml. I can write a little tool which will put all the files where they need to be and modify oxyAuthorOptionsSa12.0.xml as needed, but I was wondering if there's a built-in/supported way to push config updates down to a group of oXygen users.

Thanks,
David

[Radu]

Hi David,

Do you mean that you edited the Docbook framework settings from the "OXYGEN_INSTALL_DIR->Preferences->Document Type Association" page or just that you modify some other options in the Oxygen Preferences?

Regards,
Radu

[dcramer]

Well, I mean that I would make a number of configuration changes ranging from adding a new framework (based on the DocBook framework) to making general configuration changes (e.g. adding elements to skip while spell checking, hiding certain toolbars by default, and so on). I want to share these changes with users and provide a mechanism for them to update their installation.

I want to avoid having each user do manual configuration at install time (though will try to leave their manual config alone for settings that I don't care about). For the initial installation, I would probably wrap the Oxygen installer in a nsis installer and have nsis lay down any config-related files. I could also provide a separate nsis updater wizard that fetches the latest version of config and framework files and replaces or merges changes to them into the local versions. For example, the nsis updater wizard might run an xslt over ~/Application Data/com.oxygenxml/oxyAuthorOptionsSa12.0.xml to merge in changes to some settings while leaving other user-specified setting changes alone.

I was just wondering if there is an existing mechanism for distributing configurations and customizations to a group of users like an Eclipse update site or something.

Thanks,
David

[adrian]

Hello,

Oxygen does have 'Project options' and 'Project scenarios', maybe these could be more useful in your setup.

One way to do what you require would be to have everyone use the same project and add all the options and scenarios that are necessary to everyone to that project. Then add the project and its files to a version control repository - SVN - and have everyone check out the project so they each would have their own instance of the same project locally. Then all you would have to do is adjust/add/remove the project options/scenarios, commit the project file to the repository and tell the users to simply update their project from the repository(or even script this at every startup). This way everyone could share in a non intrusive way the options and the scenarios.

The project options can be triggered in each option page(so they can be selective) from Options -> Preferences.
The Project Scenarios option is located in the Document -> Transformation -> Configure Transformation Scenario dialog.
The same applies to the validation scenarios: Document -> Validate -> Configure Validation Scenario

Regards,
Adrian

[dcramer]

Hi Adrian,
Ok, thanks. That's interesting. I'll probably go ahead with a nsis-based approach though. I think users will want to create projects for collections of related documents to facilitate searching all of them at once and so on.

But the project options/scenarios is useful because I can tell users to make any config changes as project-level changes and then just replace their app-level config files with mine.

Thanks,
David