InstallAware

Hi,

I am evaluating InstallAware by importing Wise Logic. I searched the forums and the whitepapers and was able to solve a lot of issues. I am now at a stage where a full install of my product works fine. However, certain things were unclear with the Install, Uninstall and Update handling.

Before I proceed with my questions, I would like to provide some background about the usage of the Wise script:
1. Fresh Installation and upgrade was managed by means of a Compiler Variable using which separate exes were created to perform a new installation and upgrades. The difference between the two were only in terms of displaying dialog boxes and decisions to install/not install certain 3rd party packages.
2. First time Installation runs programs that install custom Windows services by using command "Run programs".
2. Installation/Upgrade starts and stops services more than once.
3. Installation/Upgrade over-writes certain files and does not modify many others.
4. With WISE, there were clear control over uninstall where the Wise uninstaller made use of its own installation logs.

I understand these are not ideal scenarios for managing any installation package, but this is a legacy code whose behavior I can neither alter now or comment much upon.

Having said that, below are my questions based on my observations:
1. Should I have a separate section for uninstallation? The converted script said that I need not have a separate uninstall section but I noticed that while uninstalling it just runs the complete installation and runs the commands that register services again.
2. I would like to retain most of the existing upgrade sequence where the script logic itself identifies upgrades without using the IA patch settings?
3. I would also prefer the native engine due to the complexity of the logic in the upgrade. Would there be benefits on using the Windows Installer engine over native engine?

I apologise for the length of the question. It would be great if you could answer the questions and guide me with suggestions on using the package.

Thanks.

Dear Rajesh,

the IA script logic is very similar to the Wise script logic/sequence. However as you can imagine, there are some differences.

As first and for test purpose, I suggest you to create a new project from scratch and then to have a look at script code that gets automatically created. This will give you a change to understand how the IA script logic works and of course, you can even integrate any additional custom code that you may need to use.
At this scope, you may create a project from the Basic Project Template (from IA IDE: New Project -> Other -> New Project Dialog -> Template tab).

If you observe the IA generated script code, you will see that the various install steps are comprised within several "Code Folding Regions".

Code folding blocks, similar to comments, do not impact script flow. They are used for organizing the setup script into easily readable,

InstallAware automatically detects whether a different version of your application is already installed on the target system. However this works by default only for setup packages created using InstallAware. InstallAware automatically handles the un-installation of all installed files, therefore, it is not necessary to manually specify any operations in order to build a correctly working uninstaller.

Please note that by default, the new created project will be based on Windows Installer Engine. At any rate, you can easily switch your test project to Native Engine at any time (just set the NATIVE_ENGINE pre-defined variable to TRUE).

The native engine is not intended to duplicate the Windows Installer engine. Instead, it is designed to provide a faster, non-transactional alternative to the Windows Installer engine. The native engine may be used stand-alone or as a complement to the existing Windows Installer engine. The following are the limitations of the native code setup engine.

For more details see NATIVE ENGINE in the IA Documentation.

The Windows Installer Engine behavior when deploying an update for a different version of a product/application, it's that by default, a full installation will always be run after the differing application version has been uninstalled automatically.

Hope this helps you to make your first steps in InstallAware.

Regards
This should give you a first asw

Thanks Francesco.

I agree I should have done that before importing the Wise scripts. I now tried to create a new project and after a first glance inside the code folding blocks of the template, some things are a little clearer. I will experiment more on this.

Appreciate the quick response. Thank you.

-Rajesh