My company is developing an application that has a dependency on another of our applications. That second application already has an Inno Setup installer.
So I think I'd like to bundle the second application's installer within the Inno Setup installer for the first application. But I'm not sure how to go about that properly. Does anyone know the "right way" to do this?
I found this: Inno Setup Knowledge Base—HOWTO: Install .MSI files. I assume the technique could be used for a nested Inno Setup installer. But I have a couple of questions about the fine details:
How could I make it so if the first application is uninstalled, the second is also uninstalled?
Is that a sensible thing to do (automatically uninstall the second application), or should I leave it to the user to do that manually?
If the user tries to uninstall the second application while the first is uninstalled, should I somehow detect that and give a warning? How could I do that?
For the level of uninstaller functionality you are talking about, I suggest you get familiar with pascal scripting in Inno Setup (if you are not already). It offers incredible customisation, but has the caveat of making your projects a lot more complex.
To answer your third question first:
Yes, you should do this. In order to do it properly, you need to add this functionality to the uninstaller of the second application (i.e. the one your app is dependent on). See Uninstall event functions in the Inno Setup help. You need to check in that uninstaller if your app is installed (by checking if HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\SecondAppName exists, for example) and in that case show an additional warning.
As for your second question:
If it is remotely possible that your customer wants to continue using the second app, even if he decides that he wants to uninstall the first one, you should offer him the choice. I would do this with a seperate wizard page in the uninstaller for your app, after your app is uninstalled.
And finally, your first question:
You need to determine the name (full path) of the other app's uninstaller exe. You can retrieve it from the registry key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\SecondAppName\UninstallString. For executing it from a script in the [CODE] section, see Exec in the Inno Setup help.
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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.
I have an installer from a third party. Through trial and error I discovered it was an innosetup installer. When I call it with the /silent flag it installs just fine, until it executes installers for 3 dependencies (direct X is one, for example) which then require user input to cancel. I want to be able to run the installer and have it either install the dependencies silently or not at all. When going through the installer GUI normally it does give me 3 checkboxes at the end on the last page of the wizard (before I would hit the Finish button) that allows me to choose whether or not to install the dependencies. Is there a way of doing this that I don't know about? From my research it seems impossible without knowing the types and components available (and executing the installer with the /help or /? options had no effect) and I will probably need to get a new installer from the third party. The only other option I can think of would be to have some sort of timeout that after a certain period of time of inactivity from the installer I kill the install process (since the files I was interested in had already been installed at that point I think).
Checkboxes on the finish page sound like postinstall [Run] entries. There is no way to influence the selection of these from the command line, except that the original setup author can choose to have a different set of options selected for interactive install vs. silent install. (Or they might have extended the /LOADINF option to work with these, although this is unlikely.)
Given that this is a third-party installer, your best bet is to contact the original vendor and see if you can get them to change the default silent selection, or to add an additional command-line parameter to change the defaults.
Failing that, you could consider using a program such as AutoIt to auto-click the wizard GUI when run non-silently.
(If the things that it's trying to install really are dependencies, though, then you probably should let it install them. And it should be installing those silently too anyway.)
Killing the install process after a specified time seems like an excellent recipe for disaster.
Those are probably [Tasks] within InnoSetup's install, which you may be able to deselect by passing /tasks="" in the command line (along with the /silent). Here is a list of command line options: http://www.jrsoftware.org/ishelp/topic_setupcmdline.htm . Adding /suppressmsgboxes may help also.
It seems it is impossible to do what I wish without knowing more about the structure of their setup. I was however successful in solving my original problem by killing the third party installer after waiting a specified amount of time (which I got from reading this question).
I have asked this exact question on the Flexara forum, but got no response up to today, so I want to ask it here.
We currently have a InstallScript project which runs fine. The resulting setup can be made unattended/silent fine.
In this setup we have some features and invoke a number of third-party installations (that are a prerequisite for running our software).
However, we have customers that want an MSI file and therefore we resorted to the Basic MSI project type.
The setup is made without too much hassle (I'm fairly new to InstallShield) and I can generate a .exe and .msi from this project.
However the only issue I have left is invoking one of the third-party installers.
That third-party installer (made with NSIS) on its turn invokes another installer which is MSI based.
This results in having error 1500 - the fact that you cannot run a msi type installation while another is running.
I've tried scheduling the CA (that are used to invoke the third-party installers) as the first action and as last, but no success.
Before resorting on the more unorthodox scenarios (like creating a task on Windows Task manager that runs after our installer finishes, or at the next reboot and forcing a reboot - which our customers don't like) or a scenario that we don't bundle the 'faulting' installer (we really like to be able to hand over a single intaller and not multiple), I'd thought I ask your input.
I've tried searching for solutions everywhere on the internet, but either I'm failing due to wrong keywords or I just didn't stumble on the right post yet.
Are there any options left for us to create a single MSI installer that is able to invoke this third-party installer (which invokes a msi installer on its turn)?
Since an EXE bootstrapper is not acceptable, there is only one solution:
store the prerequisite installers in Binary table of your MSI
create some custom actions which extract them from this table and launch them
schedule them in InstallUISequence, for example right before Progress dialog
use searches to detect if the prerequisites are installed or not
condition your custom actions with the search results
Basically, you need to launch them during the installation UI. It won't work if you launch them during InstallExecuteSequence.
I don't think the basic MSI project supports this, but it may be supported by more advanced project types. Other setup authoring tools offer direct support for this.
You can try InstallShield's "Chained .msi Package" feature.
Hi I have a problem and I need some direction.
I have an old application that have an install shield installer, for which I don't have the installer scripts. Now I want to do a simple patch for that application using Inno Setup.
I was reading the documentation and if I knew the appId I could just append to the same installation the new files. However I don't now what Id that application have. I tried a simple script using the same name but it didn't work either.
Is it anyway of finding the appId to append to that installation?
Can someone point me in the right direction, or is not possible to do it?
The short answer is no, you cannot create an update package that is 100% seamless to the previous Install Shield package. The reason being, whether you know the AppId or not, InnoSetup appends a _is to the end of any AppId given for adding to the registry. Quite a funky action if you ask me but it's the way of the world and let's not forget you're dealing with a free application. They had their reasoning and it is sound, just doesn't make sense for your needs at this point.
You can always do what I did when faced with the same situation:
Find the AppId of the original installation.
a. Under the Control Panel open Add/Remove Programs.
b. Find your application in the list and make a note of the name.
c. Open RegEdit.
*DISCLAIMER: THIS COULD ADVERSELY AFFECT YOUR SYSTEM SO BE CAREFUL
d. Open the following registry key: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
e. Click on the first GUID you come to and check the value of DisplayName in the right pane against the name you took note of earlier. If this value matches you've found the AppId - it is the GUID you have selected.
f. Select the next GUID and go back to step 1e until you have a match.
Use this AppId as the AppId you use in InnoSetup but add the word "Update" to your title.
Build and run your installation.
Now you will have two entries in Add/Remove Programs for your application but one is clearly marked update. You've also done the additional leg work to ensure that the AppId is as much a match as possible making it easier for other programs to determine that they're related.
Best of luck in your endeavors!
Much searching has lead me to find several descriptions of how to create a bootstrapping msi, but these solutions all assume the msi is local or a standard Windows component. Is there a way to make an msi that downloads an installer (which is also an msi) with normal MSI or Wix code rather than by having the bootstrapper execute some non-native program to do so?
My experience with msi's has been it's not possible to run 2 at the same time. (could be wrong though)
What I ended up doing was to instead make an installer exe using Inno Setup (http://www.jrsoftware.org) and ISTool (http://www.istool.org) which downloads and installs the various msi's. With ISTool it's very easy to do.
I know it's not as chic or sexy as Wix, but it worked for me very well.
I would create a custom action that runs in the InstallUISequence. This would download the MSI if necessary (to the source folder), and then try to launch it as a nested installation.
Windows prevents two installs from being in the InstallExecuteSequence at the same time, so if you're looking for a silent install solution with a bootstrapper, you're SOL.
However you can start another install from the UI sequence, which is probably an OK solution as long as you advise your customers that certain other dependencies must be installed first if they're going to deploy via group policy or some other 'silent' method.
If it helps, I'm pretty sure you can also call MSIEXEC with a URL, eg. msiexec.exe /i http://some.domain/blah.msi /passive
I would suggest that you write a native app and have it run the first msi and then run the seccons msi. I wrote a blog on how to do this. Here is a link (http://blog.foldertrack.com/?p=45)