In a previous blog posting, I covered DWF Viewer 6.5 Install Possibilities. For Autodesk DWF Viewer 7.0, we dropped Windows 98 as a supported platform. This allowed us to upgrade to the Microsoft installer. We now provide an MSI file.
Quality Assurance Engineer, Jason Bull reports that Autodesk DWF Viewer 7.0 can be installed silently via the following:
msiexec /i SetupDWFViewer.msi /qn
Company-wide Install
Your IT department can install the Autodesk DWF Viewer across your company. By installing the Autodesk DWF Viewer silently, the viewer can be included as part of a company-wide automated script. For example, this is particularly useful when installing Autodesk DWF Viewer 7.0 company-wide using SMS.
Automatic Install
An alternative to installing it across the company is to have an automatic install occur for each user on the first time he attempts to view a DWF file.This is done by referencing a DWF file from an HTML page. The HTML page contains a special object tag that identifies the location of an Autodesk DWF Viewer installer and a required Autodesk DWF Viewer version. When the HTML page and referenced DWF file are viewed, Microsoft Internet Explorer checks the user’s computer to determine if the Autodesk Viewer is already installed. If the viewer has not been installed or an older version than the one specified is present, Internet Explorer downloads the cabinet file (which contains the Autodesk DWF Viewer components) and facilitates an install. The installation process is interactive where the user must allow the install to complete. On Windows XP SP2 systems, users must allow a popup at the start of the installation process. The cab file has been digitally signed by Autodesk to ensure its authenticity. An example of the HTML to initiate an install is:
<OBJECT CLASSID="clsid:A662DA7E-CCB7-4743-B71A-D817F6D575DF"
CODEBASE="http://www.autodesk.com/global/dwfviewer/installer/
DwfViewerSetup.cab#version=7,0,0,928"
WIDTH="50%" HEIGHT="25%">
<PARAM NAME="Src" VALUE="my.dwf">
</OBJECT>
This HTML references the cabinet file from the Autodesk site with a local file called my.dwf. This HTML requires version 7.0.0.928 of the Autodesk DWF Viewer. A user with a previous release of the Autodesk DWF Viewer might have version 6.5.0.679 or older. Specifying 7.0.0.928 in the CODEBASE tag would initiate a download/install for this user. If you wish to allow users to install from a local copy, you can place a copy of the cab file on your local network and change the CODEBASE URL to point to the cab file at that location.
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