## Installation of binary distribution of Java application excelExporter

excelExporter is a stand-alone Java 8 application. An installed Java 8 (version 1.8) or higher is a prerequisite of running excelExporter. The Java runtime environment suffices. You can get the Java JRE at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html (Apr 2021).

Either the Java executable, java.exe, needs to be in the Windows search path or the Java installation path — where bin\java.exe is located in — is assigned to a new environment variable COMFRAMEWORK_JAVA_HOME. Given, you’re Java executable would be c:\ProgramFiles\jdk1.8.0_144_win32\jre\bin\java.exe, then you could issue the command

    setx COMFRAMEWORK_JAVA_HOME c:\ProgramFiles\jdk1.8.0_144_win32\jre

from a Command Prompt window. (Now you need to open another shell window to proceed; the current one will not take the new setting.) Please note, that the proposed command will install the new environment variable only for the current user. A machine wide setting by putting /m at the end of the command line requires administrator rights.

Now you unzip the contents of the excelExporter archive to any location. However, to avoid later problems with localizing files from shell command line and scripts you should only consider paths, which do not contain any blanks.

Tip | Usually, excelExporter is distributed as an element of the comFramework package. If so, then the comFramework archive is the only one to unzip; folder excelExporter is contained.

The complete installation path, including the name of the archive’s root folder excelExporter is assigned to a new environment variable EXCELEXPORTER_HOME. The script that launches the Java application, will set the Java CLASSPATH based on this root directory. Java will fail to locate the required jar files if the environment variable is not properly set. Given, you’d copied the archive’s contents to the folder c:\ProgramFiles, then you could issue the command

    setx EXCELEXPORTER_HOME c:\ProgramFiles\excelExporter

from a Command Prompt window.

The application launcher is a Windows script named excelExporter.cmd. It is located in the folder excelExporter\dist. It’s a very simple script and Linux and Mac OS users won’t have any problems to write the same script in their respective shell script languages. The script becomes most useful if the folder dist is added to the system search path (i.e. environment variable PATH would be extended by c:\ProgramFiles\excelExporter\dist in the example case above). Consider to type

    pathman c:\ProgramFiles\excelExporter\dist

in a shell window.

Alternatively, the tiny script excelExporter.cmd can be copied to all locations where the code generator is about to be used.

If you decided to extend your PATH variable then you should test your installation by opening a new shell window, cd’ing to an arbitrary working directory and submitting the command:

    excelExporter.cmd --help

The application should be started and it should respond with its usage text.