For sophisticated use of Manifold from
a command line, use Manifold
Commander.
Manifold provides the ability to launch Manifold with a Manifold project, or to install the Manifold ODBC driver from a Windows command line.
For sophisticated use of Manifold from
a command line, use Manifold
Commander.
For users who want to use a batch file to launch Manifold or Viewer with a particular .map project file, Manifold supports the usual Windows way of opening a file as a command line argument for the opening program. Make sure that the manifold.exe executable to be launched is first in the PATH, or execute these command lines from within the installation folder of the desired Manifold installation.
To launch Manifold and open myproject.map in Manifold:
manifold.exe myproject.map
That will launch Manifold and open myproject.map in Manifold.
Use double quotes around the file name if there are any special characters or spaces in the .map file name. For example, we might run:
manifold.exe "-this is my latest project.map"
The Manifold ODBC driver for Release 9 may be installed or uninstalled from a Windows command line. Running ODBC commands requires administrator privileges. Manifold Viewer does not support use of the Manifold ODBC driver.
To install the ODBC driver, run
manifold.exe -odbcupdate
To uninstall the ODBC driver, run
manifold.exe -odbcdelete
A command line option allows users to see what serial number has been used on a given machine. To see the first eight characters of the serial number in use for the Manifold license, run
manifold.exe -showserial
That launches a Manifold session with the first 8 characters of the serial number reported in the Log window.. Launch View - Panes - Log Window to see the Log window. The first characters of the serial number are not written into the log file and are only shown in the Log window.
This command line option works for all editions of Manifold, SQL for ArcGIS Pro, and Release 8 (reporting the serial number in the HIstory pane), but not for Manifold Viewer , which does not use serial numbers.
Using command line execution is a great way of publishing Manifold projects for viewing by beginners using Manifold Viewer. See an example in the meteorites.zip download, which packages a Viewer portable installation with a meteorites.map project and a batch file, all in a single zip file that is only 33 MB in size.
Download, unzip the file, and then double-click on the double-click me.bat file to launch Viewer with the meteorites project. The batch file shows how easy it is to publish data in a form that includes the free Viewer and does not require users to do a separate Viewer download and installation.
The zip file containsthe meterorites.map project file, a double-click me.bat file, and a folder called viewer which contains a Viewer portable installation and files. The .bat file contains a single line:
start viewer\manifold.exe meteorites.map
The start command is used to launch a manifold.exe executable in the portable installation and to open the meteorites.map project. The start command is used so the command window does not stay open after Viewer is launched when the .bat file is double clicked. The .bat file could be named anything, but in the example it is named double-click me.bat to make it clear to unskilled users what to do.
We can adapt the above to distribute any project together with a portable installation of Viewer.