Custom dialog boxes (created with the Custom Dialog Builder) can be installed interactively from the IBM SPSS Statistics Utilities menu (Install Custom Dialog in Version 17 or Custom Dialogs>Install Custom Dialog in Version 18). This works fine, but if you have a lot of dialogs to install or need to do this on many computers, it gets rather tedious. Fortunately you can automate this process with a simple bat file. Here's how.
A custom dialog in Version 17 is an spd file. Â Open that in Winzip or any application that can read zip format.
There will be two or more files there: one has extension .xml, another .properties. Â There may also be htm and image files, and if there are translations, there will be multiple .properties files.
I'll assume that the target system has SPSS installed in directory c:\x.
There will be a directory named c:\x\ext\lib.
In that directory, make a subdirectory whose name is the root filename you see in the zip.  If the zip file has files named dialog1.properties etc, that would be a subdirectory named dialog1.
Copy all of the files to that new directory.

The next time SPSS is started, the dialog will show up.

If the dialog is implemented as a Python or R extension command, those files will not be in the spd but need to be copied to the extensions subdirectory of the SPSS installation or other appropriate location.  They would typically be an xml file defining the syntax and one or more Python or R files.

If the target system is running Vista and SPSS is installed under Program Files, you might need admin permissions to run your bat file.

Version 18 can use another format known as spe that bundles all the implementation files together along with some descriptive information, but you can similarly extract and copy the files.  It will include an spd file as above along with the implementation files.

Note that if you are using distributed mode (IBM SPSS Server) , the implementation files will be needed on the Server computer.



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