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[Deploying Qt Applications]

Deploying an Application on the Symbian platform

Applications are deployed to Symbian devices in signed .sis package files. The .sis file content is controlled with .pkg files. The .pkg file contains a set of instructions used by tools to produce a .sis file. qmake generates a default .pkg file for your project. The .pkg file generated by qmake is typically fully functional for testing purposes but when planning to deliver your application to end-users some changes are needed. This document describes what changes are typically needed and how to implement them.

Static Linking

Qt for the Symbian platform does currently not support static linking of Qt libraries.

Shared Libraries

When deploying the application using the shared libraries approach we must ensure that the Qt runtime is correctly redistributed along with the application executable, and also that all Qt dependencies are redistributed along with the application.

We will demonstrate these procedures in terms of deploying the Wiggly application that is provided in Qt's examples directory.

Building Qt as a Shared Library

We assume that you already have installed Qt as a shared library, in the C:\path\to\Qt directory which is the default when installing Qt for Symbian. For more information on how to build Qt, see the Installation documentation.

Shared Libraries

After ensuring that Qt is built as a shared library, we can build the Wiggly application. First, we must go into the directory that contains the application:

 cd examples\widgets\wiggly

To prepare the application for deployment we must ensure that the .pkg file generated by qmake contains the relevant vendor information and embeds the necessary dependencies to the application deployment file (.sis). The content of the generated .pkg file can be controlled with the Symbian specific qmake DEPLOYMENT keyword extensions.

First, we will change the vendor statement to something more meaningful. The application vendor is visible to end-user during the installation.

 vendorinfo = \
     "%{\"Example Localized Vendor\"}" \
     ":\"Example Vendor\""

 default_deployment.pkg_prerules = vendorinfo

Second we will tell the Symbian application installer that this application supports only S60 5.0 based devices:

 supported_platforms = \
     "; This demo only supports S60 5.0" \
     "[0x1028315F],0,0,0,{\"S60ProductID\"}"

 default_deployment.pkg_prerules += supported_platforms

You can find a list of platform and device indentification codes from Forum Nokia Wiki. By default .pkg file generated by qmake adds support for all S60 3rd edition FP1, S60 3rd edition FP2 and S60 5th edition devices.

As a last step we will embed the Open C, Open C++ and Qt .sis files to the Wiggly deployment file:

 embedded_deployments = \
     "; Embed Open C dependencies" \
     "@\"$${EPOCROOT}nokia_plugin/openc/s60opencsis/pips_s60_1_6_SS.sis\",(0x20013851)" \
     "@\"$${EPOCROOT}nokia_plugin/openc/s60opencsis/openc_ssl_s60_1_6_SS.sis\",(0x200110CB)" \
     "@\"$${EPOCROOT}nokia_plugin/opencpp/s60opencppsis/STDCPP_s60_1_6_SS.sis\",(0x2000F866)" \
     "; Embed Qt dependencies" \
     "@\"$$[QT_INSTALL_PREFIX]/qt_rndsigned.sis\",(0x2001E61C)"

 default_deployment.pkg_prerules += embedded_deployments

By embedding all dependencies to the application deployment file, the end-user does not need to download and install all dependencies separately. The drawback of .sis embedding is that the application .sis file size becomes big. To address these problems Forum Nokia is planning to release a smart installer which will take care of downloading and installing the necessary dependencies over-the-air. The expected availability of smart installer is 1Q 2010.

Now we are ready to compile the application and create the application deployment file. Run qmake to create Symbian specific makefiles, resources (.rss) and deployment packaging files (.pkg). And do build to create the application binaries and resources.

 qmake
 make release-gcce

If everything compiled and linked without any errors, we are now ready to create an application installation file:

 make sis

If all binaries and dependencies were found, we should now have a self-signed wiggly_release-gcce.sis ready to be installed on a device. For more information about creating a .sis file and installing it to device see also here.

[Deploying Qt Applications]