Clickonce ask for a License agreement

Question

Is it possible to build a ClickOnce deployment, for a Win Form application, to ask for the user to agree to a License Agreement before continuing?

Answer 1

I don't think there is.

If you deploy your click-once app from a webpage, you could have the user accept the agreement there before installing the app. The effect will be the same.

Answer 2

Answer from MSDN by User Heath8041:

Sneaky Way to get an EULA displayed for your clickonce application in VS2005

Here's a round about way to get your clickonce applications to install with an End user license agreement. Basically you build a redistributable component that can be seen in your prerequsites dialog box under the publish window. This allows a nice way to have all your apps reuse the same agreement, if you want. It's very easy, you need only to create three files ("eula.txt", "product.xml", and "package.xml") and two folders in this case ("EULApackage", and "en"). I documented everything below on how I set mine up. it works great. the only thing you'll have to change is the Name of the component and of course you'll need your own end user licence agreement saved as eula.txt. The component needs to be put in the following path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\BootStrapper\Packages in this folder you should see some sub folders for other redistributable components. First make a new sub directory for your component. I called mine EULApackage. in this new folder you need the following. -A file called product.xml and a sub folder called "en" (for english) you can do various things with the product.xml file, but here's the way mine looks

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<Product
  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/2004/01/bootstrapper"
  ProductCode="EULA.Bootstrap.Component"
>
  <!-- Defines list of files to be copied on build -->
  <PackageFiles>
    <PackageFile Name="en/eula.txt"/>
  </PackageFiles>


  <Commands>
    <Command PackageFile="en/eula.txt"
      Arguments='' >

       <ExitCodes>
         <DefaultExitCode Result="Fail" FormatMessageFromSystem="true" String="GeneralFailure" />
       </ExitCodes>

    </Command>
  </Commands>
</Product>

*in this case the file eula.txt was the text file that was my license agreement. Note that it's not an rtf file. Rtf won't display propertly using this method.

Now inside my "en" subfolder i put the eula.txt file and another xml file called package.xml, again this xml file can be used to do all kinds of stuff

heres the contents of my version*

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<Package
  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/2004/01/bootstrapper"
  Name="DisplayName"
  Culture="Culture"
  LicenseAgreement="eula.txt">

    <PackageFiles>
        <PackageFile Name="eula.txt"/>
    </PackageFiles>

  <!-- Defines a localizable string table for error messages and url's  -->
  <Strings>
    <String Name="DisplayName">Texas Instruments End User License Agreement</String>
    <String Name="Culture">en</String>

    <String Name="CancelFailure">User Failed to Accept Texas Instruments End User License Agreement.</String>
    <String Name="GeneralFailure">A fatal error occurred during the installation of ELUA Component Execution</String>
    <String Name="AdminRequired">You do not have the permissions required to install this application.  Please contact your administrator.</String>
  </Strings>    
</Package>

Note: whatever you put in the DisplayName field is what your user will see when he's confronted with the eula text If you have all this put together correctly and in the right folders, the next time you start up VS2005 and go to your publish tab -> prerequisites you should see the DisplayName field. Just check this as a prerequisite for you app. when the user clicks install on the publish.htm file it'll present the user with the conents of your eula.txt file inside of a standard license acceptance dialog box. if the choose accept your stuff installs, if they decline then it exits rather nicely and nothing is installed on their systems. If you mess up the formatting for either of the two files or if you leave out the "en" sub folder then the component won't show up in the prerequisites dialog (when publishing)

Additional notes: although this works great it is a round about method and their are ways around the eula, such as if your publish.htm file allows them to run the application directly (I guess without the bootstrapper starting)but if they click the install button it will run. This also has the benifits of not running every time you publish an update to your clickonce application. They have to run the boot strapper to get the eula to show up (by clicking the install button on publish.htm) I figured out this method by looking at some of the other redistributable components that were already in the path C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\BootStrapper\Packages. You can look in those other components product.xml and package.xml files to see what cool things they've done with them. Good luck

Answer 3

For anyone who is trying to do this it will work... I am using Visual Studio 2008 and liek Coppermill said, the location is "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bootstrapper\Packages\"

I also had to add a couple other things to the product.xml:

</Command>

I also had to create a "Do nothing" executable otherwise the elcu.txt would open up in notepad. Anyway, good luck...

Answer 4

<ExitCodes>
     <ExitCode Value="0" Result="Success"/>
   </ExitCodes>

Answer 5

Has anyone got this to work with VS2008? I'm deploying a WPF app and have followed the steps exactly, but no new fields show up in my list of prerequisites. I've tried it on different dev machines to no avail. I wonder if I'm missing something.