Controlling the splash screen from your application

If you have enabled a splash screen for your exe4j executable, you usually want to hide it once the application startup is finished. The splash will be hidden automatically as soon as your application opens the first window.

However, you might want to hide the splash screen programmatically or update the contents of the status text line on the splash screen during the startup phase to provide more extensive feedback to your users.

With the exe4j launcher API you can

• Hide the splash screen programatically

  Invoke the static method com.exe4j.Controller.hide() as soon as you wish to hide the splash screen.

• Update the status text line

  Invoke the static method com.exe4j.Controller.writeMessage(String message) to change the text in the status line.

The launcher API of exe4j is contained in exe4jlib.jar which can be found in the top level directory of your exe4j installation.

Note: you do not have to add it to the classpath of your application and distribute it along with it, since that file is always contained in the executable.

Receiving startup events in single instance mode

If you have enabled the Allow only a single running instance of the application checkbox on the "Executable info->Single instance mode" step, the application can only be started once. For a GUI application, the existing application window is brought to front when a user executes the launcher another time.

The scope of the single instance check can be per-user or globally across all users. For the per-user scope, the "Per session" setting controls whether multiple RDP sessions for the same user can support one instance per session or only one instance across all sessions.

In single instance mode, you may want to receive notifications about multiple startups together with the command line parameters. If you have associated your executable with a file extension, you will likely want to handle multiple invocations in the same instance of your application. Alternatively, you might want to perform some action when another startup occurs.

With the exe4j launcher API you can write a class that implements the com.exe4j.Controller.StartupListener interface and register it with com.exe4j.Controller.registerStartupListener(StartupListener startupListener). Your implementation of startupPerformed(String parameters) of the StartupListener interface will then be notified if another startup occurs.

Startup notifications only work when the same user starts the executable again. With the global scope, a startup of a different user will not produce a startup notification.

The launcher API of exe4j is contained in exe4jlib.jar which can be found in the top level directory of your exe4j installation.

Note: you do not have to add it to the classpath of your application and distribute it along with it, since that file is always contained in the executable.