How does navigating pages work?

[AnonymousDefaul]

I would like to have a summary of how page navigation works. I have seen the ' How can I control the flow of the pages?'  question, and I've been trying to use next_page, but I end up with an installer that has unexpected results when using the back button. I can then start using back_page to get this right, but I end up needing the equivalent of a stack that I can push and pop pages from, when it would seem like this should happen automatically.

So how does it work?

What pages are displayed in what order by default, like installdir. How do things like allowComponentSelection affect this default ordering? What happens when I use next_page to insert pages before installdir, and how is back_page determined if I don't explicitly set it?

If I set it, is it automatically changed on the next page? If so, what is it set to?

Thanks for your help.

[AnonymousDefaul]

The order of the pages is usually determined by the order in which the parameters appear in the <parameterList>. Apart from that, some of the pages are reordered. For example, <licenseparameter> pages will be displayed at the beginning and the component selection page will be placed after the installdir (if it exists).

When trying to enforce the order, in you do not want to make this order dependent on runtime conditions (such as the values of other parameters) the recommended approach is to use the <insertAfter> and <insertBefore> attributes. For example, to place the installdir page right before the readytoinstall page (regardless of the order in which you placed it in the XML) you could use:

<directoryParameter>     <name>installdir</name>     ...     <insertBefore>readytoinstall</insertBefore>     ... </directoryParameter> 

Playing with the next_page and back_page special variables is only needed to dynamically alter the order.

You can find additional information in this article.