JNLP extension and associations

3346449

First of all apologies for the potential for dumbassery in this question. I am totally new to the JRE and am struggling with one particular aspect...

A legacy system is currently running on JRE6u43 but the system admin wants to upgrade to JRE8u66 which in theory is no problem. I've worked out how uninstall the 6u43 and install 8u66 in a silent fashion and everything seemed ok.

The system is launched by clicking on and running a JNLP file. It looks, however, like when I uninstall the JRE6u43 all the file associations, settings and even the .JNLP extension is being deleted from the PC. The JRE8u66 installer then doesn't seem to recreate these associations and the extension. Therefore when you attempt to fire up the jnlp file it moans and asks for the associated application.

I can browse and select the javaws.exe file and tick the 'always use this program' option but I need to somehow include the associations and extension creation in my deployment script because, this manual selection will be beyond the ability of the end users.

Is my deduction that the JRE installer no longer creates the relevant extension(s) and associations or is this some kind of bug? I tried the latest JRE installer and it still fails to create them.

I tried setting the JNLP File/MIME Association to ALWAYS in the Java Control Panel > Advanced Settings. Is this setting supposed to somehow set the JNLP file extension and associations. All it seemed to do was add the line deployment.javaws.associations=ALWAYS in the deployment.properties file but does it didn't seem to do much else.

Do I need to now manually create the JNLP extension in Windows and then associate it with the javaws.exe program? Or am I missing something else?

If I do have to create the extension and associations is there any doc that shows how to do this?

Thanks for any help as it's driving me absolutely nuts...

eudriscabrera-JavaNet

You must try to open the JNLP extension file with javaws (java web start). If you are running the application behind a proxy server/firewall, you must notice the following notes.

Java Web Start software must be configured with the correct proxy settings in order to launch applications from outside your firewall. Java Web Start software will automatically try to detect the proxy settings from the default browser on your system (Internet Explorer or Netscape browsers on Microsoft Windows, and Netscape browsers on the Solaris Operating Environment and Linux). Java Web Start technology supports most web proxy auto-configuration scripts. It can detect proxy settings in almost all environments.

For more information about javaws : http://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/javaws/developersguide/contents.html