I have gone through several upgrades lately. -7.2.4-7.3b4-7.3-7.3.1
I noticed that each time the link that is placed by ignition on your desktop when it runs for the first time stops working. I can forsee this becoming a pain since every time I upgrade I will have to send out an email and walk people through the process of deleting the link, navigating to the webpage, scrolling down to click the right project launch button and so on and so forth.
While the gateway upgrade process is pretty painless, it would be awesome if upgrading the clients was just as painless.
To get around this I started placing a link to the gateway webpage on the desktop as well.
I was wondering if a ticket could be created so that the link placed by ignition will still work even if the version changes (perhaps through a version detection and redownload on mismatch mechanism?)
Dravik is right, that’s your best bet. The shourtcut is simple to create and should follow this formula: "{path to javaws.exe on client}" -localfile "{path to jnlp}"
ie:
"C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\javaws.exe" -localfile "http://IP:PORT/main/system/launch/client/PROJECT_NAME.jnlp"
And here are the links for the various modes:Windowed JNLP: http://IP:PORT/main/system/launch/client/PROJECT_NAME.jnlp
Full-Screen JNLP: http://IP:PORT/main/system/launchfs/client/PROJECT_NAME.jnlp
Applet URL: http://IP:PORT/main/web/applet/client/PROJECT_NAME
Designer: http://IP:PORT/main/system/launch/designer/designer.jnlp
I believe if you go into your gateway configuration>redundancy and then uncheck autodetect http address, and then type in your gateway’s ip address and ports in the box below, it will correct this issue. someone correct me if I am wrong.
I don't think that setting will have any effect on the shortcuts that OP is asking about.
That setting allows you to manually enter the IP address or hostname to connect to the Ignition gateway. This is most often relevant if you have multiple network adapters or IP addresses or are doing tricky things with name resolution (DNS).
To the best of my understanding, the Ignition gateway dynamically generates the launch file (JNLP). It will always reside at those listed URLs. You can safely create Windows shortcuts, web hyperlinks, or whatever to point to those locations. The links will always work and you will always get an updated instance of your project. Java web start prompts you to put links on your desktop of Java Web Start launched projects that point to your local cache. These links work ok, but often break as you upgrade your gateway, update projects, or whatnot.
It's safest to use the gateway directly, or links/shortcuts to the appropriate JNLP project. BTW Robert's shortcut path will allow you to specify the JRE instance that you want to launch. It usually works fine to just do a shortcut to the URL.
I’m a little late to this party, but maybe I can get it back on track.
The shortcuts that Java Web Start (JWS) creates automatically are different than a straight shortcut to the JNLP. We have no control over the shortcuts that JWS creates. In some ways, the JWS shortcuts are better b/c they’ll allow a client to launch in a redundant setup even if the master is down, which a straight JNLP link will not do.
The shortcuts that JWS creates shouldn’t (and more importantly, don’t in my experience) break after an upgrade.
Given this, let’s start over following this idea: why are your shortcuts “breaking”? Can you describe in more detail the nature of the failure?
I’m not sure why the shortcuts are failing. As I mentioned originally, we went through a series of upgrades, and the ignition launch links that are placed on the desktop automatically after running a client for the first time ceased to work.
@nathan: the way I envisaged it working was for ignition to deploy one of the html shortcuts as described by the previous posters. Either that or some sort of re-download-on-version-change mechanism. It now seems that neither of these options appear possible
I wanted to post about this since I thought this might become an issue we would start fighting once we started increasing the number of clients on site.
Same problem here.
What i did as a workaround was to save the file onto the desktop rather then execute it.
By this i mean when you click on the Project link to launch it Firefox will ask you to save or run it.
Simply select save, and save the file to the desktop.
Instead of clicking on the Jave created shortcut we use the saved JNLP file.
Hope this helps.
As a note for the developers.
When the link brakes and one tries to use the short cut from the JWS the Loading window apears but it doesn’t contiune.
Try as we might, we can’t reproduce this issue. For those of you having this problem, please report: What OS, version of Java, and user permissions are you working with when this problem happens?
