Web Media Blocks and CD

[Aaron Young]

I'm currently evaluating your product and one sticking point I've run into is that your uncompressed CD builds don't allow any configuration, so everything is uncompressed including pre-requisites and other "support" files.

As an example, our product has the prerequisites; IE6 SP1, MDAC 2.8, .NET 2.0 and SQL Express 2005.

These alone take up 500MB which doesn't leave enough space on a standard CD for our application and runtime files.

The exact same prerequisites on a competitors CD layout is <300MB, (quite a difference.)

If InstallAware allowed you to configure the Web Media Blocks so that they were compressed for the CD build, that would be ideal, bringing the prerequisites down to <100MB.

So, that's the problem, in looking for a solution, I thought that maybe I could configure the Web Media Blocks to look to the installation media by specifying a variable in the URL, i.e. $ROOTDIR$, however that doesn't seem to work.

Should I be able to use variables in a Web Media Block's URL? (I was sure I saw reference to it in the forum or a white paper saying you could, but I cannot find it again.)

If not, are there any plans to allow more control over the uncompressed CD build, or an alternate way of achieving my goal?

Regards,

- Aaron.

[CandiceJones]

Hi Aaron,

InstallAware decompresses native runtimes so it can recompress them better. This is why when you do an uncompressed build, the file sizes are larger compared to normal runtime sizes (which are compressed); and this is also why when you do a compressed build with InstallAware, you get runtime sizes even smaller than the compressed runtimes of the competition.

Either way, the solution is really simple - just do a full web build and press everything onto CD! No web connection will be sought at any time if all the web media block files are found on the CD right next to your setup file.