Importing MSI dialogs

[pmessina]

I'm using a trial version of InstallAware 6.0 Admin and completed an MSI import. However, the dialogs from the MSI were not imported. Is this supported? Am I doing something wrong?

[MichaelNesmith]

The native InstallAware dialog editor contains a lot of controls that are not available with MSIs - such as interactive HTML/Flash progress billboards. Additionally, the InstallAware dialog editor is a lot easier to use when hooking up controls to get their values into your MSIcode script, and allows you to build highly customized dialogs (you could build an Explorer in InstallAware just using the built-in dialog controls!).

For these reasons the MSI import process does not convert dialogs. To take maximum advantage of unique InstallAware features, such as partial web deployment, MSIcode scripting, the recommended approach is to start your setup from scratch in InstallAware. The Database Import Wizard helps ease this task substantially by migrating most of your MSI actions into InstallAware MSIcode, which you can copy-paste to your new project.

You can also use the (Un)Install MSI Setup command to run an external MSI which you may have already built directly in InstallAware. Your "master" InstallAware setup will even capture and display the native progress of your "shelled to" MSI installation. So there are lots of ways to re-use your existing MSI files in InstallAware - just pick and choose the one that's most effective for you!