Collecting System Requirements

Applications are usually installed and configured according to the user's specified needs. It's good practice to collect this data from the user at the beginning of the installation procedure through a series of interactive dialog boxes. The application uses this information to install its components and configure the user's system.

Typical information to be gathered at this point includes the following:

• Name of the Microsoft Exchange Server computer and the site on which the application will be installed.
• Display name of the application's directory object, the display name of the application's service, the Windows NT account name of the service, and the service's password.

The setup program should also verify at this point that the destination computer has enough free disk space for the installation.

For more information about the way a setup program gathers information to be used as attribute values of directory objects, see Creating the Directory Object.

Examples: Collecting System Requirements

The sample gateway's setup program uses the following files to collect information at installation time:

• DIALOGS.RC Contains the dialog boxes that are displayed.
• GWUISTF.C Contains dialog control routines and validates some of the data entered by the administrator.
• GWSETUP.C Performs high-level dialog control operations and data validation.