An Add-On is any piece of software that can be deployed via the Mobile Infrastructure deployment process for Mobile Solutions. So an AddOn from the deployment perspective works the same way as any other application in the Mobile Infrastructure area.
When an AddOn is deployed, the Mobile Infrastructure registers the Add-On as a kind of invisible application (that cannot be started from the MI Home page) and extracts the content of the .zip file to a folder.
The idea is that an Add-On is packed as a .zip archive and thus extracted into a specific folder of the device’s directory structure. The default directory in which a specific Add-On is stored is <MI root>\addons\.
The AddOn mechanism offers several possibilities for the handling of the AddOn installation, refered to AddOn „types“ that we'll discuss in-depth below:
A generic AddOn is simply a .zip archive file that contains any type of file, for example:
When an Add-On like this is deployed, the Mobile Infrastructure extracts the content of the .zip file to the folder <MI root>\addons\<NAME_OF_ADDON>\.
It is also possible to specify a folder to which the content of the .zip archive will be extracted. This is done via adding an entry to the manifest file of the AddOn .zip archive:
In this case all the files of the AddOn .zip archive are extracted to the /windows folder of the mobile device. The directory in this case is an absolute path, so on a laptop the files in this example would be extracted to C:\windows , on a PDA they would be extracted to /windows/.The definition of an absolute pathname is system dependent. For example, on UNIX, a pathname is absolute if its first character is the separator character. On Windows platforms, a pathname is absolute if its first character is an ASCII '\' or '/', or if it begins with a letter followed by a colon. If the folder name specified is a relative path, the folder will be created reltive to the installation directory of the Mobile Engine.
Using the AddOn mechanism it is also possible to deploy libraries that are put into the class path of the Mobile Infrastructure and can hence be used by all Mobile Engine applications. In order to use the Add-On mechanism to deploy libraries, the .zip archive has be enhanced with a MANIFEST.MF file which contains the entry GLOBALLIB = X. Such a file would look like this:
The complete library Add-On archive would then look like this:
Technically, a library Add-On's jar file is copied to folder <MI root>/lib and the fully-specified path of the jar file is added to the file <MI root>/listOfJars.txt. This file defines the class path of MI and is read automatically at MI start up.
Using the Add-On mechanism it is also possible to deploy configuration settings which will update the current MI Client configuration settings. In order to use the Add-On mechanism to deploy configuration settings, the .zip archive has be enhanced with a MANIFEST.MF file which contains the entry CONFIGUPDATE:X. The manifest will therefore look like this:
The settings which are deployed have to be included in the .zip archive in a file that has the extension .config. This file contains the properties to be set on the Mobile Infrastructure client in the format of a java.util.Properties file. It will look like this:
![]() |
For information on all configuration parameters that are explicitly released by MI, please refer to the PropertyKeys interface. You may only set the parameters described there via a Configuration Add-On. Setting other parameters may corrupt the MI client!! For fully specified names of the parameters described in |