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Problem with Shortcut Items

Posted: Wed Nov 02, 2005 4:03 am
by Gareth Owen
I have noticed that on a couple of occasions, the icon location referenced by the shortcuts does not exist, the GUID seems to be incorrect, i.e not the same as the GUID of the application.

Is it possible to set the icon path to be one of the files installed by the application? We already have the icons in a DLL, in the TARGETDIR, could we get the short cuts to link to this rather than the one in the SYSTEMROOT\\INSTALLER\\{xxxxxxxxxx}?

Cheers

Gareth

Posted: Wed Nov 02, 2005 7:02 am
by sinan
The GUID is managed internally. It will be the correct GUID, but this is not the value you expect it to be. For details, please consult Windows Installer documentation - in particular, the part about shortcut tables and advertising.

In your setup project you can reference a custom icon in your advertised shortcut; however this will still, when the MSI is built and installed, use the funky path you have observed below. This is done by Windows Installer and there is nothing that we can do to work around it.

InstallAware does its best to hide the underlying tables, structures, and intricacies of Windows Installer; but there is very little we can do where advertising is involved. In fact, this is the first (and only!) post on this entire forum where I have had to mention MSI tables!

My recommendation is for you to steer clear of advertising, since you don't need it for what you think you need it for anyways :) Just select all the shortcuts you are creating in the visual view and set their type to regular :D

Posted: Thu Nov 03, 2005 9:38 am
by Gareth Owen
Thanks again :)