Configuring the ot2load.exe Loader

The ot2load.exe program was created so that when a customer recieves an update to OurTown2000, this update could easily be distributed to all OurTown2000 installations on the network.

Installation

The ot2load.exe program should be the first program executed. When it completes, it opens OurTown2000 (ot2.exe). The ot2load.exe file must be copied to the root installation directory on each client (the same directory the ot2.exe file exists in now). Then, any existing desktop and start menu shortcuts should be updated so that they point to "ot2load.exe" instead of "ot2.exe" as shown below:

If you have a new installation of OT2x (2005 edition) the setup program defaults to this shortcut.

Utilization

To have the ot2load program update files on your network, you must create a text file called ot2load.txt in the root directory of the server installation of OurTown2000 (make sure it is NOT saved as unicode). The root directory of the OurTown2000 installation is defined as the directory directly above the Data directory. To find out where the root directory of the server installation is, open OurTown2000, then click on "Admin" in the menu at the top of the screen and select "File Locations" from the drop down list. After entering the password you should see a screen like below:

The root directory is the directory above the "DATA" directory listed under "Constituents". In the case above, the root directory would be "\\PRODELL10\E\AARON\OT2V12\"

The OT2load.txt configuration file

Each file which is to be updated has its own line in the ot2load.txt file. This line is split into two sections divided by a pipe "|" symbol. The section to the left is the path to the updated file. The section on the right is the path to copy the file to on the client relative to the installation directory. Any line which does not contain a pipe is considered to be a comment.

In this example, the first line is a comment and the following two lines are equivalent to each other. The second line gives the location of the test.exe file relative to the server root directory. The third line gives the full network path to this file. If you are using the full network path to the files, there is no reason you have to keep the updates within the OurTown2000 server directory structure.

Because there is no directory information following the pipe, the file will in both cases be copied to the client installation root directory (the same directory ot2load.exe exists in.)

Operation

When the ot2load.exe program starts, it reads the ot2load.txt file on the server line by line and attempts to update each file. In the following cases it will NOT update the file:

The program is unable to find the file to copy from. If there are any typos in the network path to the file, or the file has been removed, the program will not attempt to copy the file but will alert the user that it cannot find the specified file.
The file to copy from is older than the file being copied to. If the file on the client was modified more recently than the file it would be replaced with, or they have the same last modified datetime, the file will not be copied. Therefore, after the client updates a particular file, it will not update that file again until the file to copy from is replaced with a newer copy.
The client directory could not be created. This will rarely if ever be a concern. If the file is to be copied to a directory other than the installation directory on the client, the program will first see if the directory exists, and if not, attempts to create it. If the program fails to create the directory for some reason (say the installation directory is read-only), the program will not attempt to copy the file, but will alert the user with a message.
One side or the other of the pipe symbol is empty. If there is no specified directory and filename to retrieve the file from or to save the file to, the file will not be copied. The program does not assume that the file it gets from the server should be saved to the client under the same filename or vice-versa.

Once a particular file has been added to ot2load.txt, the client computer will check for a new version of the file every time it runs. There is no need to remove old pointers unless you also remove the file the program has been instructed to copy from.