What’s New in InstallAnywhere 2017

For information about new features added in InstallAnywhere 2017, refer to the following sections:

New Features in InstallAnywhere 2017 SP1
New Features in InstallAnywhere 2017

New Features in InstallAnywhere 2017 SP1

Refer to the following sections for new features and changes in InstallAnywhere 2017 SP1:

Integration with FlexNet Code Aware
Enhancement to Existing GUI Automation Fixture

Integration with FlexNet Code Aware

Note • For complete information about FlexNet Code Aware, refer to the FlexNet Code Aware user documentation.

InstallAnywhere now includes integration with FlexNet Code Aware, an automated open source risk assessment and package discovery solution that enables you to quickly scan your products for security and intellectual property (IP) compliance risk.

The current release of FlexNet Code Aware supports analysis of the following files:

Java Packages
Node Packages
Nuget Packages
RPM Packages
Ruby Packages
EXE & DLL Files

Security vulnerabilities are looked up against the National Vulnerability Database (NVD).

Running FlexNet Code Aware

FlexNet Code requires a separate license from InstallAnywhere. There is also trial/evaluation version. For more information, refer to the FlexNet Code Aware product page of the Flexera Software website.

To run FlexNet Code Aware from within InstallAnywhere, click Run FlexNet Code Aware Analysis from the InstallAnywhere Tools menu. This menu option is disabled out if you are not currently in an open InstallAnywhere project.

When FlexNet Code Aware completes the scan of your project, a summary displays showing the number of files scanned, and the number of open-source packages and vulnerabilities found. A View report button is provided if you have a fully licensed version of FlexNet Code Aware. For more information about the details provided in this report, refer to Reading the FlexNet Code Aware Report.

Reading the FlexNet Code Aware Report

Note • The FlexNet Code Aware Report is not available in trial/evaluation mode. A fully licensed version of FlexNet Code Aware is required.

To view the FlexNet Code Aware Report, click View report on the summary dialog that appears after FlexNet Code Aware has scanned your project.

The FlexNet Code Aware report consists of several sections:

The initial Summary View presents the user with a Scan Summary, Operational Risk assessment, Security Vulnerability Exposure, and License Exposure.
The Scan Summary section provides details regarding the codebase that was scanned, including a breakdown of file types, percent of files analyzed, and number of findings.
The Operational Risk section provides a composite risk rating based on the combination of packages with Intellectual Property (IP) issues and packages with Security Vulnerabilities.
The Security Vulnerability Exposure and License Exposure sections provide a breakdown of the types and categories of identified issues.
The Package Inventory View, available by clicking view full package inventory in the Scan Summary section, provides a complete list of discovered open source and third-party packages with associated licenses, security vulnerabilities, dependencies, and detected copyright statements.

The Package Inventory View provides filters that you can use to execute targeted queries to refine the list to various package types of interest.

The following figures show the initial Summary View of a sample FlexNet Code Aware Report.

FlexNet Code Aware Initial Summary View

The following figures show the Package Inventory View of a sample FlexNet Code Aware Report.

FlexNet Code Aware Package Inventory View

Viewing Package Details

Click a vulnerability count listed in the Vulnerabilities column of the Package Inventory report page for each package you want to review:

The Vulnerabilities detail page appears, covering a portion of the Package Inventory report:

Enhancement to Existing GUI Automation Fixture

InstallAnywhere now has improved GUI Automation Fixture by adding new APIs for launching binaries; that is, you can now launch Windows/Linux native installers in addition to the pure Java installer. The new APIs have ability to interact with various UI components and get UI attributes of the components like labels, text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, combo boxes, list boxes and buttons.

Parameters that the APIs need can be obtained as an optional tool tip by running the installer with a special command line.

install.exe -Diashowtooltip=true

For complete information about each of the APIs, refer to the docs available at IA_HOME/gui-test-auto/javadocs. For a sample GUI Automation class, refer to your InstallAnywhere build directory at IA_HOME/gui-test-auto/example/source/com/installanywhere/ia/automation/gui/samples/basic/BasicProjectAutomation.java.

Supporting platforms: Windows and Linux.

 

New Features in InstallAnywhere 2017

InstallAnywhere 2017 includes the following new features:

New Rules Manager Allows Creation of Complex Rule Expressions at the Project Level
Customizable Advanced Runtime UI Themes
Ability to Install RPMs and DEBs from Install Linux Package Action
Support for the Latest Platforms

New Rules Manager Allows Creation of Complex Rule Expressions at the Project Level

InstallAnywhere now includes a rule expression manager which allows installer authors to:

Create complex rule expressions at the project level
Combine multiple rules and save them to a single rule expression
Reuse a rule or a set of rules across the project
Associate a rule expression to a file extension, including the option to automatically associate the rule expression to a file whenever a file containing that file extension is added to the project
Remove associated rules from custom file extensions

See the following help topics in the InstallAnywhere Help library for procedures about various functionality that you can do with project level rule expressions:

Configuring and Saving a New Rule Expression
Associating a Rule Expression to a File Extension
Loading a Rule Expression
Deleting a Saved Rule Expression

Customizable Advanced Runtime UI Themes

InstallAnywhere has improved the runtime user experience of the installer by adding customizable advanced runtime UI themes. A theme is a set of runtime UI settings that are used to customize the installer panels and frames. For example, you can specify fonts, font attributes, and even import your own fonts. You can customize the colors of windows and buttons, choose to use frameless windows, display your company’s own logo in the installer steps panels, and many other settings.

For complete information about each of the advanced runtime UI theme settings available and for information about how to customize advanced runtime UI themes, see the UI Panel Settings Area topic.

Ability to Install RPMs and DEBs from Install Linux Package Action

Edition • These features are available in the following editions:

InstallAnywhere Premier Edition with Virtualization and Cloud
InstallAnywhere Premier Edition

In InstallAnywhere 2017, the Install Linux RPM install action has been updated to Install Linux Package and now allows you to install and uninstall Linux RPM Package Manager (.rpm) files, Debian (.deb) packages, or files from a default or a custom repository. The package files can either be bundled with the installer or can be pre-existing on the system.

If you choose to install from a repository, there are two options:

Install from Repository—Install from the default distribution repository on the machine you are targeting
Install from Repository / Custom Repository—Install from a specified location of a custom repository. When you click the Custom Repository check box, the Choose Repository button is enabled, allowing you to search for the custom repository location, choosing either a *.list file for Debian file distributions or *.repo for Linux.

If the RPM or DEB is relocatable, and the Relocatable check box is selected in the action customizer, the file is installed to its location in the file tree.

Additionally, the RPM or DEB can be set to Ignore Dependencies (similar to the --nodeps option for the command-line RPM tool) and to Force Installation (--force).

You can also choose Do Not Uninstall. For custom repositories, the only check box that is available is to Do Not Uninstall.

The Install Linux Package action allows you to add only one package at a time. If you want to add additional packages, click Add Action again.

For complete information about install actions, refer to the Install Actions topic.

Support for the Latest Platforms

InstallAnywhere now supports the following platforms for running the installer run-time environment, as well as for the InstallAnywhere authoring environment:

Windows 10 Anniversary Update (x86 and x64)
Windows 2016 Server (x64)
macOS Sierra (10.12)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 (x64)
OpenSUSE Linux 13.2 (x64)
SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 (SP1, x64)
Fedora 24 (desktop editions; x64)

InstallAnywhere now supports the following platforms for running the installer run-time environment:

CentOS 7 (x86, x64)
CentOS 6.8 (x86, x64)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 for PowerPC (little endian)
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (x64)

Enhancements

This section lists enhancements that were included in InstallAnywhere 2017:

New Command-Line Build-Related Argument to Generate Encrypted Variable Value
New Require Root Setting Available Under Project Page in the Platforms View
Modify Text File Action Enhancement
Support for Croatian Local Added

New Command-Line Build-Related Argument to Generate Encrypted Variable Value

When building using the command line, you can use a new build-related argument to allow you to generate an encrypted hexadecimal value that can be directly copied and pasted into a response file as an encrypted variable value.

build -encrypt <product-code> <text-to-encrypt>

The resulting encrypted hexadecimal value can then be used later. For example, you could update the master response file with an encrypted value generated from a password without needing to first run the entire installation to only generate this value.

This enhancement resolves issue IOJ-1758930.

New Require Root Setting Available Under Project Page in the Platforms View

The following new settings are available in the Unix area of the Project Page under the Platforms view.

UNIX Settings

Setting

Description

Require Root

Specify whether the installer requires root account permissions. A root account is the user name or account that by default has access to all commands and files on a Linux or other Unix-like operating system. It is also referred to as the root account, root user, or the superuser. If you select Yes in this setting, the Error Message setting under Require Root is enabled.

Error Message

Specify an error message to appear if the installer is run with a non-root account. This field is enabled when Yes is selected from the Require Root drop-down list.

Modify Text File Action Enhancement

The Modify Text File actions have been enhanced to allow you specify both the source file that is being opened and read as well as the destination file that is being saved after it has been modified. To account for this change, the previous File Encoding field has been replaced with the following two fields:

Source File Encoding
Destination File Encoding

In previous versions of InstallAnywhere, there were instances where leaving the File Encoding field blank resulted in a loss of characters when saving the destination file as a result of Java not being able to easily detect what kind of encoding the file was actually using. Therefore, with this enhancement, you can now explicitly specify the source file and destination file encoding to ensure no loss of characters are experienced in the process. Now, the encoding that is applied is dependent solely upon the destination file encoding provided irrespective of the source file encoding. The following table provides example of the file encoding that is applied in cases where the destination file coding is left blank, is invalid, or is unsupported.

File Encoding

Source File Encoding

Destination File Encoding

Encoding Applied

empty

empty

UTF-8

invalid (eg. Hello)

empty

UTF-8

unsupported (cp1047)

empty

UTF-8

empty

invalid

Platform default

empty

unsupported

Platform default

This enhancements applies to the following actions:

Modify Text File - In Archive Action
Modify Text File - Multiple Files Action
Modify Text File - Single File Action

Support for Croatian Local Added

Edition • The Premier edition of InstallAnywhere includes default run-time strings in 31 supported languages. The Professional edition includes default run-time strings in 9 languages.

InstallAnywhere has added support the Croatian locale. You can now specify Croatian as a locale you want your installation to support. For information about specifying a locale to your installer, refer to the Generating Multilanguage Installers topic.

See Also