Advice needed on specific behaviour of installation types

[Pete B]

Hello IA guys
First off, I downloaded IA a few days ago and have been experimenting avidly with it. Already I have achieved successful resolution of scenarios I would never have thought an installer could handle. I love it ! - this is a truly remarkable piece of work. You push the flexibility aspect of IA hard, in my opinion, this is fully justified - seriously good stuff
Now you're feeling good about everything, here come 2 crumby questions which I haven't managed to trawl the answers from either the help file or this forum.
1. Taking installation types, compressed seems best suited to CD distribution (and Web distribution in some ways). I started from this angle but experimentation and words of wisdom from the help file indicate that updating is no fun this way. As I understand it, 1. A patch would require original source media to be located by the end user ugh! (also potentially messy as indicated by the helpfile) 2. A full upgrade with a changed revision code, therefore NEEDSUPGRADE = TRUE, would result in a complete uninstall and reinstall. Potentially awkward, for me at least.
Is this correct so far ? Are those the only options for a compressed build upgrade ?
This leaves web builds. Which look fine but I need to be sure that a web build can distributed on CD. So, provided I distribute any *.7zip files alongside my main executable file all on CD, can I be assured that an internet connection will not be required for this ? I really only want a user to potentially have to download WMBs on an upgrade, not during a first install.
2. Also, I noted that when I made a WMB into [OFFLINE CONTENT] while experimenting, there seems to be no way to reference what this originally was. I can extract the GUIDs from the script but how do I reference eg. what particular set of files that [OFFLINE CONTENT] directive actually originally referred to ?

best wishes

Pete B.

[CandiceJones]

1. Yes, if all weblocks are found on the CD next to the setup file, no download will ever be initiated! And sources will also be locally cached, so you're good to go.

2. Not sure what you mean. Reverse engineering of packages in this way is not supported, in case that answers your question.

[Pete B]

Candice
Thanks for the fast reply.
From your advice it looks like compressed builds are out and web builds are definitely in.

With regard to my second question, to clarify ...
This situation came about during experimentation. I had a 3rd party mergemodule which I included. This appeared as a WMB (only because, I think, it was originally defined as a feature). I then decided to incorporate it into a web build directly, so deleted its WMB name at which point it appears in the main script as [OFFLINE CONTENT]. All I was really trying to get at is whether it is possible to determine what a section of offline content actually contains/refers to after it has been created. I know I can leave myself a comment reminding me but I just thought double clicking may reveal the contents instead of a blank WMB dialog - I don't want to reverse engineer it because I can always delete it and start again if necessary.

Also, is there a way of logging the build output messages so I can see what's going on before they zip through and the display window closes ?

BTW IA is most definitely going to be the installer I purchase, regardless !

best wishes

Pete B.

[CandiceJones]

Hi Pete,

The script shows you everything that's going inside the offline region. As for merge modules, they fall outside the scope of MSIcode scripting, so you won't see them anywhere there. Unfortunately, it is not possible to conditionally execute MSMs - but you can convert MSMs into MSI files actually and use the (Un)Install MSI Setup command to indeed conditionally run them. Without that, MSMs become part of the main setup and always run unconditionally.

[Pete B]

Thanks Candice, I appreciate the explanation and the pointers therein - very helpful indeed.

I'll be back.
(sorry, couldn't resist, I guess that humour is pretty well worn in your part of the world )

best wishes

Pete B.

[CandiceJones]