NSIS for plugin installers
 

Hi,

I am looking for an installation software capable of installing plugins to our software product. The point is that we want our users do install plugings, developed by 3rd parties.

In our product, plugins have predefined structure, but variable content. To configure a plugin with our software, several operations are needed: some files should be copied to certain locations, some records should be added to the DB, so changes in the configurations files should be done. However, the exact file names, DB records, configuration changes - are variable.

Our idea was to ask the plugin developers to provide an XML file describing their plugin, and write a "generic" installer, performing the physical installation according to the XML content.

Say, the XML says:
<filename>myplugin.dll</filename>
The installed will locate the muplugin.dll, and place it the plugins' folder of our prodiuct.

Is it possible to do that with NSIS? If not - what could be an alternative?

We realize that we can write such a module in C#, but we hope there is some infrastructure for such a job.

Thanks for any hint,

Max

Did you not search the forum for XML?

-Stu