Advanced

Language
Here you can change the texts of the Updater. If you just want to translate the updater into another language, you may be able to find your desired language in the list of Default Languages. Select the Language you want, and click Restore.

If your language was not listed, or you just want to change the texts for any reason, click the customize button. Your project's current Language.ini is located in the root of your project's folder, and will be launched in your PCs default text editor when you click customize.

The Language.ini is included fully inside the Updater.dat, which is generated by Dispatcher upon each release, and downloaded to your user's PCs only when you release updates. If you never change any language settings (or if you manually delete the Language.ini from your Project's folder), the file is not transferred during updates to your software, saving you about 1k of bandwidth (after compression).

In the absence of any/all of the custom Language variables, the Updater reverts to an internally stored English language file. So if you only wish to change some of the variables in the Language.ini, you may delete the other entries.

In the Language.ini, you can use certain variables, which will be replaced at run-time:

%%name	Name of your Project
%%myVer	The version the user is/was using (before the update completed)
%%newVer	The version the user is being updated to
%%n	New Line character
%%1	Specific to particular message variable
%%2	"

Some of these will not work in all scenarios. For example, you can't use the %%newVer variable before the Updater has determined the new version.

Minimum Days Between Update Checks
This is a quick way to make the Updater only contact your Update Mirror once every X days. With this, you can start the Updater every time your program is run, having it only check every X days, but still let the user "Check for Updates..." manually.

Note that to force the Updater to check for an update, run it with the -check parameter.

To check every other day, set this to 2.
To check every time the Updater is run, set this to 0.

If you want to let your users choose how often to check for updates, the best option is to program that option into your software, and run the Updater as often as the user requested.

Stats Reporting URL
This is an advanced feature, only supported by the Professional and Corporate editions of Dispatcher.

This allows the Updater to report stats back to your server by POSTing variables to a URL of your choice, when an update is applied on a user's PC.

The variables that are passed to your URL are:

name - The name of your software
gid - The global ID of your software
new - The version name of your software that the user is being updated to
old - The version name of your software that the user is being updated from
custom - Nothing by default, but you can set this to whatever you want

If you wish, you can use the 'custom' variable to add more custom data to the url (for example: you could add a UserGUID to track update patterns). If you wish to add multiple custom params, you will have to concatenate and tokenize them yourself. To set the custom variable that will then always be passed to the StatURL on each update, run the updater with the -setcustomurlparam parameter (-setcustomurlparam VALUE).

If you were to use PHP to read these variables in, an example URL could be: http://example.com/stats.php
Example code:

<?php
$name = $_POST['name'];
$gid = $_POST['gid'];
$new = $_POST['new'];
$old = $_POST['old'];

// Here you would probably want to add these variables to a database or something...
?>

Remember to sanitize your variables when inserting them into SQL databases (you can use: mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['name']) in php), to avoid SQL Injection attacks.