I created a setup for my product targeting Windows XP and later, to be installed using windows installer (WI). The resulting .msi file has a product code, let's say PC1 (actually a guid), and an upgrade code UC1 (also a guid). After some time, I created a new setup for a newer version of my product. The new .msi file has a new product code PC2 and the same upgrade code UC1 (also called a major upgrade). My company wants to install the .msi file with our own installer. For that, we basically use MsiInstallProduct to install the .msi file, while the entire UI is in our own install program (and we use MsiSetExternalUI to ask WI to send us notifications). The problem that I am having is the following:
if the two builds of the product are installed on the same machine using "msiexec /i myapp.msi" then there will only be one entry in the "Add/Remove Programs" of "Programs and Features" control panel applet. or in other words, during the installation of the new build, the old one is uninstalled.
if the two builds are installed on the same machine programatically using MsiInstallProduct, there will be two different entries in control panel.
Once again, only if I try to install it programatically (using either MsiOpenPackage+MsiDoAction or MsiInstallProduct), the upgrade does not happen and I end up with two entries in the control panel. I also found that if I do not set an external UI callback using MsiSetExternalUI, before calling MsiInstallProduct or MsiDoAction, then the upgrading part of a new installation also works as expected, no duplicate entries in the CP.
The callback that I use for MsiSetExternalUI is basically the same as the one in this MSDN article:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa368786(v=vs.85).aspx
What can I do (or what I need to handle in my callback) to avoid having duplicate/multiple entries in control panel?
Thanks and best regards,
Levente
Re our comments above, I did a google search for CLIENTUILEVEL and the first several hits indicate to me that CLIENTUILEVEL having a null value is normal and that REMOVE=ALL is working. The comments indicate to go a little furthor down the log and find out why the uninstall (Remove existing products) is failing. If you could email me a complete log file ( chrpai#iswix.com ) I could look through it for you.
RemoveExistingProduct standard action
Link to article describing how to interpret Windows Installer log files (see comments)
RemoveExistingProducts running but not uninstalling Options
I ran into the same behavior with my ManagedMsiExec sample project: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/delay/archive/2012/01/09/make-things-as-simple-as-possible-but-not-simpler-managedmsiexec-sample-app-shows-how-to-use-the-windows-installer-api-from-managed-code.aspx
Changing the logging behavior of my app didn't help in my case. But after (independently) noticing the same "CLIENTUILEVEL= REMOVE=ALL" strangeness in the logs, I found a workaround which was to explicitly call MsiSetProperty and set CLIENTUILEVEL to 0 before calling MsiDoAction.
This appears to me to be a bug with Windows Installer itself (incorrectly setting CLIENTUILEVEL during RemoveExistingProducts), but perhaps there's something else going on I don't understand. At any rate, I've had success with this change and maybe others can, too. :)
Related
I am using WiX to install a executable and I have used ManagedBootstrapperApplicationHost for CustomUI.
Is it possible to get the name of the feature being installed at the time of installation ?
If possible then how can we get the name of the feature ?
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.
Features aren't installed one after another. For example if 3 features are being installed, each with 10 files then the InstallFiles action will install all 30 files at the same time. Same thing with registry entries. So you can't display a UI that says "Installing Feature1" and then later on "Installing Feature2" because that doesn't happen. All you can know is that some list of features are being installed.
Your comment asks about finding out whether a feature installed successfully or not. This issue never comes up - there are never some features that install and others that fail. An MSI install is a transaction and it either all works or fails and rolls back and deletes changes it made so that the system is restored to its previous state.
It's not clear why the list of features is so important to display. If you use the MSI's internal UI there is a feature selection dialog where the user selects which features are to be installed; if you use the Burn UI the same thing is available, so the user can see what features have been chosen.
Inside the MSI the list of features being installed (after they've been selected) is in the ADDLOCAL property, but that's the internal name. It could be used to display a list of the features that were installed at the end, but again by definition what was chosen is installed otherwise the install would have rolled back entirely. I don't believe I've ever seen an install where the list of MSI features installed is displayed at the end - it's redundant info. It would be useful to know the scenario you have, or what problem you're trying to solve, and if you believe that you need to display a list because some might install and others might fail then there is no point, as I have said.
Our application is deployed to the target machine with an msi file. All works nicely. Our tester has gone through his plan, and one of the tests requires deleting the application's configuration file. The application is designed to alert the user with a dialog on startup saying "missing config". However, what happens is that - somehow! - the software starts the installer again and retrieves the missing file from the msi! Which is nice, but not what we want. How do we disable that behaviour?
without going into much depth of the windows installer mechanics (if you interested in that there a plenty of articles about this), the shortcut of the software is probably advertised, which means the windows installer checks if everything is in its place before the software is started.
if you can edit the msi, make the shortcut non advertised.
if you can't, install it with DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS
e.g. msiexec /i myMsi.msi DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS=1
please note that this is only a quick (and dirty) workaround,
to fix this proper you need to understand the whole windows installer advertising (also called repair or self resiliency) mechanism.
but explaining all the causes and the mechanism of the repair is far beyond this answer and there are quite some articles and posts about that on the internet (and especially on MSDN and stackoverflow)
There is a more correct answer to this, and it is NOT DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS. You set the component id to null in the MSI file to prevent repair of that individual file. See ComponentId comments here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa368007(v=vs.85).aspx
Edit the MSI file with Orca to delete the Componenty ID, and write an uninstall custom action to delete the file at uninstall if it's there.
In addition, that's a redundant test. Windows will restore that file for you if it's missing, so the idea that you need a test to notify that it's missing is pointless. The true test should be that Windows will restore the file if it's lost, and your app needs to do potentially nothing about the missing file.
You don't mention what tool you are using to make your MSI but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess Visual Studio Deployment Projects (.VDRPOJ).
One of the (many) horrible things about this tool was that it fails to expose the foundational concept of components. Instead it makes every file a key file of it's own component and hides the existence of the component from you. I say 'was' because Microsoft killed this project type in VS. There are around 50k people complaining on UserVoice to bring this tool back and I'm guessing that 49,990 of them don't know what a key path is.
Windows Installer has a concept called the component rules and each component has a keypath. The keypath teaches MSI how to handle repair scenarios. But your tool has to allow you to be able to control this to make it work.
Windows Installer is functioning exactly the way it's supposed to function. You just aren't up to speed on what that is.
However, if you want to ignore Windows Installer best practices and continue using the tool you use today, the trick is to install the app.config file as a different file. Then have the application copy the file to the real file name on run. Windows Installer won't service what it didn't install.
Several answers have been provided that can work:
You can install the file with a blank guid. Then you need to remove it on uninstall using the RemoveFile feature. You will also run into issues if you want to replace it during an upgrade. Could be tricky at times.
You can disable the advertised shortcut(s), but this affects too much in my opinion.
Finally you can use my suggestion to install a separate non-advertised shortcut to use to launch the application. Such a shortcut bypasses the self-repair check. It may still be invoked by other means such as missing file associations, COM registration or similar, but those are exception states.
However, my preference is that an application can start without a config file present, if at all possible. I always suggest a good startup routine with "internal defaults" available. The startup routine should also degrade gracefully if faced with any file system access denied conditions.
Most importantly you should place this config file in the userprofile so you can generate the file on first launch for the user in question. It can even be copied from a read-only copy in the main installation directory.
When you generate a file from internal defaults and put it in a userprofile location, the file will have no interference with Windows Installer at all. The issues that results is how to clean up user data on uninstall. I discussed this with Stefan Kruger (MSI MVP) at one point, and I agree with his notion that user data is indeed user data and should not be automatically dealt with by your installer at all. Leave it installed, and clean it up via system administrator tools if necessary - for example logon scripts.
We have an installer solution written in Visual Studio 2005 Installer; that calls a C# custom action and we have hit a known issue, regarding the fact that on an upgrade - the old install code is run and not the new code, because Windows is running a cached version of the custom action dll. We know this and although not over the moon about it - we have moved on.
When we release a new version of the installer and a user runs it, we now want it to check to see if an ealier version is installed - if there is one; we want to display a message telling them that they have to remove the old version via Add/Remove Programs. We know if they do a manual uninstall followed by an install, then all is fine and dandy - BUT it doesn't matter how many times we tell our users, via documentation; that this is what they have to do - they will still try and just run the new installer, without removing the old version first.
Therefore, we would like to put up a message and thus force them to to what they are told !! I've seen some installers do this ( though of course not sure what installer package was used to create these ). We only have VS 2005 and of course orca !!
Cheers,
Chris.
This can be done through a custom launch condition:
create a search which determines if the old version is installed (you can search for a component, registry entry or file)
use the search property as a custom launch condition
For example, if the search property is OLD_VERSION, the launch condition can look like this:
Condition: NOT OLD_VERSION
Description: An older version was found. Please uninstall it using "Programs and Features" in Control Panel.
When OLD_VERSION property is set to a value (an older version is found), this launch condition will show the message and stop the install process.
This doesn't quite make sense. Have you remembered to change the package GUID in your new setup? The package GUID identifies a specific setup file, and if two MSI files have identical GUID they will be treated as the same file regardless of whether they are or not. This could trigger a cached version of the MSI to be invoked and all sorts of hell breaks loose.
I would recommend reading up on "major upgrades" which will allow automatic uninstall of the existing version before the new version is installed. You also need to make sure you understand the basics of the technology before deploying to the wild. You must NEVER use identical package GUIDs for any MSI files. It's practically always wrong, and will lead to very mysterious problems.
I can't write up the whole major upgrade solution here, but basically it involves authoring the "Upgrade" table of your MSI to detect versions to uninstall. You need to change the package code, product code and version number (only 3 digits matter) and keep the same upgrade code (two MSI files with the same upgrade code "know" they are related - i.e they are from the same product family). Check MSDN for samples of major upgrades.
NB! If you have deployed MSI files with duplicate package GUIDs to your developer machine, it could have stray installs that must be cleaned up with MSIZap or similar. Use caution, or better yet test your new installer on a clean test system. Developer systems are full of junk and not generally good for MSI testing.
I'm running into a roadblock using InstallShield LE in VS2010. The second time running the resulting setup.exe (with incremented version numbers), I get the error
Another version of this product is
already registered
By "incremented version numbers", I mean I changed the Minor Version, Build Number and Revision to larger numbers in AssemblyVersion and AssemblyFileVersion of my .exe (the DLL's are set to "1.0.*")
[assembly: AssemblyVersion("0.2.103.005")]
[assembly: AssemblyFileVersion("0.2.103.005")]
[assembly: AssemblyInformationalVersion("Alpha 0.1 - 2/8/2011")]
and also updated the Product Version in the General Information tab of the Installshield LE setup project from 0.10.0000 to 0.11.0000.
I did come across instances of this error message in other SO postings and on the manufacturer's community support forum, but did not find a solution that applies to me.
It turns out the answer is to create an entry on the Upgrade Paths tab. When you do that, InstallShield LE will present a file selection dialog. If you have the old installer, presumably you can browse to it to get information about what version you wish to be able to upgrade from. In my case I didn't have the old installer handy, so I pressed cancel and the new Upgrade Paths entry was created anyway. I then adjusted the properties of that entry to specify a minimum and maximum version for the upgrade, and everything worked as expected.
EDIT
(from #lookatmike's comment)
You also have to change the Product Version and (somewhat counterintuitively) the Product Code in the general information tab. The Upgrade Code must stay the same.
OK - This problem was driving me CRAZY - and I haven't found a perfect answer online.
So I decided I was done screwing around.
This may not be the "BEST" way to solve the problem - I'm sure there is some convoluted MSI-based way of "handling this properly" but I couldn't figure it out (I guess I'm dumb?)
Basically my installer just makes sure .NET is installed, and copies some files into the Program Files directory, adds some registry entries, shortcuts, etc.
If you have a more complex installation procedure - I'd encourage you to find the "right" answer elsewhere. But for something simple like I've got (and I suspect 95% of people struggling with this problem have) this works just fine.
First - NEVER touch "Product Code". I believe this is correct procedure for MSIs across the board... you shouldn't be changing the product code. And this solution relies on that as well.
Next - Copy the product code to your clipboard - we'll need it in a second.
Basically, we're going to tell InstallShield to ALWAYS UNINSTALL THE PRODUCT if it already exists on the machine.
If you or your partners ever run the install SILENTLY - make sure you do this in both places:
For "File Name and Command Line", enter:
msiexec /uninstall {YOUR PRODUCT CODE HERE} /passive
That's it. Now your installer will always uninstall the old version.
NOTE: THIS DISABLES ANY SORT OF "Am I running a newer version of the installer" CHECK.
I often reuse my Visual Studio projects and got this problem. As #Eric-j said I had to change the product code in the General Information tab of the VS Install Setup project:
I am new to WiX 3.0 and writing my first installer based on WiX (coming from Wise).
If the product is already installed (in the current version), I want the installer to switch to "repair"-mode automatically. It should behave exactly like as if I would have clicked "repair" in the Windows software dialog.
It must behave like this to fit in the overall installation process of the system.
I read the documentation but can't get hold of the problem...
You can use the Installed property to conditionalize a SetProperty element for REINSTALL and REINSTALLMODE properties. Be careful to test upgrades to ensure that you add the other parts of the condition (REMOVE<>"ALL") so that the upgrade of the old product stays an uninstall and doesn't flip to repair. :)