Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Filter orders down to the hardware level

So we have basic detection based on customer orders but there is a way to do it based on hardware configuration. I consider hardware configuration to be a poor way of filtering, but it is sometimes necessary as a company won't always update SKU's or the file that we filter fast enough (bad business process in that case). Sometimes though, it's required if you want to limit installs to useful software. If you were an OEM and shipped NERO with every system, NERO may not be useful to users who have only CD drives (non-writeable). To filter thourgh to ensure usefullness, it now becomes a two stage process:

Find the SKU or customer order to ensure he gets, say, NERO.

--------------------------------
:Customer order file
:responses.txt
NERO-Y
--------------------------------

So we check to ensure that the client/customer has requested NERO:

------------------------------
:Check for NERO
findstr /I /C:"NERO-Y" responses.txtIF '%ERRORLEVEL%' == '0' (
SET NERO-FOUND=1
ECHO Nero was found!
) ELSE (
SET NERO-FOUND=0
ECHO Nero was NOT found!
)
------------------------------
And now we filter for the hardware ID using DevCon:

------------------------------
:Find the CD Burning Hardware ID
Devcon findall hwids * > "%userprofile%\desktop\HWIDS.TXT"

IF '%NERO-FOUND%' == '1' (
findstr /I /C:"IDE\CDROMSONY_CD-RW__CRX230ED" HWIDS.TXT
)
IF '%ERRORLEVEL%' == '0' (
:run silent setup command
NERO.EXE /S
ECHO Nero was installed!
)
---------------------------------

We don't need an "ELSE" in the above as we expect it to fail gracefully and not require more code to tell it to simply continue as it will do so anyways.

And now the OEM or corporation won't install useless software unless hardware that can take advantage of it is present. :)

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