After you have created your ZIP archive,
you can then create a CAB (CABinet) file that will contain your
compressed and archived applet for Microsoft's Internet Explorer
users. Building CAB files is a little less user-friendly than
building ZIP files since there is graphical interface like WinZip
for creating CAB files.
Instead you will have to use the command
line interface provided by CABARC. CABARC is a compression/archiving
program distributed with Microsoft's SDK which should be located
either in the "bin" directory under your main SDK directory or the
"bin/packsign" directory.
Options and Commands are summarized in the
following table
Parameter
Command
L
Used to list the contents of
a cabinet.
N
Used to create a cabinet
file.
X
Used to extract single or
multiple files from the cabinet.
Options
-c
Confirms the files to be
operated upon
-o
Overwrites without
confirming when extracting
-m
Sets the type of compression
to use to LZX:<15..21>, MSZIP, or NONE. The default is MSZIP
-p
Used to preserve path
names
-P
Used to strip a specified
prefix from files when they are added
-r
Used to recurse into
subdirectories when adding files
-s
Used to reserve space in the
cabinet for signing. For example, -s 6144 reserves 6k.
-I
Used to set the ID of the
cabinet when creating a cabinet. The default is 0.
Cabarc Commands
As you can see, there are several commands
that CABARC supports. You can list the files in cabinets, add files
to cabinets, and remove file from cabinets.
For the most part, you will be primarily
interested in creating CAB files. Thus, it is the "N" command that
you will use most often. For example, the following CABARC command
would create a CAB file called "MyApplet.cab" that would contain
all of the class files in the current directory.
cabarc N MyApplet.cab *class
CABARC also allows you to list the files in
a current cabinet. In this case, you will use the "l" command as
follows:
cabarc L MyApplet.cab *class
The "L" command returns information about
the size of each file in the cabinet, the dates and times each was
added, as well as the attributes of each file
Finally, CABARC allows you to selectively
remove files from within a cabinet file using the "X" command. For
example, to remove the SupportClass.class file from the example
above, we would use the following syntax:
cabarc X MyApplet.cab SupportClass.class
Notice that when extracting files, the
default behavior is for CABARC to ask you if you would like to
overwrite existing files if they have the same name as those being
extracted.
CABARC Options
Of course, it is most likely that you will
specify options when performing actions with CABARC. For example,
consider the MyApplet example we have been using so far in this
chapter. The MyApplet program actually contains several files and
several directories. Unfortunately, as shown above, if you simply
use the "N" option to create your archive, you will not be able to
add all these files and directories in one simple line. You would
have to add each directory and file separately.
Fortunately, CABARC provides the -r option
to add files to a CAB archive recursively. Thus, to create a
functional CAB archive for our applet, we would want to use
something along the lines of
cabarc -r N MyApplet.cab *
As you can see, the -r option will add all
of the files and all of the subdirectories necessary for our cabinet
file. However, the -r option will add files that are not necessary
such as the .txt , .java and .html files. In order to make your CAB
archive as small as possible, you will want to only add the
necessary files.
To do so, you can specify the list of files
to add using something like the following:
cabarc -r N MyApplet.cab *class *.jpg, *.gif
In this case, you will only get files with
the specified extensions.
Referencing your Cabinet
However, you are not quite done yet. Once
you create your cabinet, you must then upload it to your web server
and make it available to web browsers using the CABBASE parameter as
follows:
