I'd say stick with C:\Program Files for the program executable and related files, for security reasons and also to follow convention.
If your application architecture requires the VFP database files to be in a path relative to the program executable, for example in a data subfolder, you can still do this in Vista and 7 by setting permissions on that subfolder. Doug Hennig showed how to do this in Inno Setup - see http://doughennig.blogspot.com/2007/12/where-should-data-go-in-vista.html. OTOH, if your application architecture allows for portable data, for example in a different folder on the local machine or a shared resource on a file server, you can configure Inno Setup to prompt the user for the location of the data during installation. I did a short videocast about how to do this; you can find it in the Videocasts section of my website at http://www.ita-software.com/foxpage.aspx. To avoid problems with virtualization of files in C:\Program Files, I'd recommend putting your foxuser.* and any other read/write resources such as INI files in an application-specific subfolder under the user's local appdata folder. Of course, your app needs to be configured to find them there, but this also has the advantage of enabling each user to have their own individual settings and preferences on multi-user machines. Doug also wrote a great blog post on working with special folders like local appdata; see http://doughennig.blogspot.com/2007/01/finding-paths-for-special-folders.htm l. His comments on Foxite in a reply at http://www.foxite.com/archives/where-to-put-the-data-on-vista-0000137073.htm are also insightful. I've been deploying apps using this type of architecture on Vista and Windows 7 machines with no problems. Let me know if you want more details. -Rick -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ted Roche Sent: Saturday, March 19, 2011 1:49 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Where to install a VFP exe and its data on Windows 7? I've got a client with a VFP9 SP2 exe I've just installed onto a Windows 7 Pro 32-bit machine. They've got a nice little installer that I'm sure they spent a bit of time getting right. The problem is that they install into C:\Program Files and have settings DBFs in that directory and data and temp directories under that folder. As an ordinary user of Windows 7, I'm running into permissions problems writing to those files or creating new ones. I suspect this is A Good Thing and it's better to go along with it than hack at the machine to try to get it to do something it was not designed for. What's the current guidelines on where a VFP executable should be installed, and where should the data be stored? -- Ted Roche Ted Roche & Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com [excessive quoting removed by server] _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/006501cbe673$bde57470$39b05d50$@com ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
