How to apply transforms and carry out silent install

[Thirulok]

Hi,

I have an InstallAware created MSI wrapped in Setup.exe. I managed to find out the silent install command for silently installing this (using Setup.exe /s). Could anyone know how to supply transform along with Setup.exe and silently carry out installation. Any instructions explaining various command line switches for InstallAware created packages will be of good help.

If it is not possible to apply transform along with Setup.exe, how to make MSI work with MST - Calling msiexec /i with extracted MSI name just opens Windows Installer and closes. No installation is being carried out. The application in question is SiteMapper.

Thanks,
Thirulok

[PaulH]

Searching today I came across this thread. I'm in a similar situation now.

I have a setup that was created with InstallAware as a .EXE. I extracted it's contents (via 7-Zip) and was able to create a transform that I want to use. Problem is that it still appears I need to use the .EXE (contained in the compressed EXE) to kick off the MSI properly.

The question is how do you apply the transform to it? Doesn't look like you can pass SETUP.EXE TRANSFORMS="Path to the .mst". Running the MSI by itself seems to cause issues where properties (like SRCDIR) become missing.

-Paul

[MichaelNesmith]

You cannot apply transforms. You should do whatever customization necessary through the MSIcode script which is in charge of setting up any runtime customizations exclusively.

[PaulH]

Oh boy that's an issue. The one I'm working on now wasn't built by me, and I need to add some registry permissions due to the nature of our environment.

Normally, when we weren't the authors of the MSI we just create a transform for the MSI with our changes.

I'm surprised we can't.

Paul

[MichaelNesmith]

Since the entire MSI has to be managed by MSIcode, your transforms may not work as expected. You can still get it to do what you want though, it will just be harder than updating the MSIcode script for the installation, which is the preferred, more direct InstallAware way. You should read the MSIcode scripting whitepaper and run some experiments with the InstallAware compiler to observe the patterns of generated MSI table entries and then to customize them. But again, the right thing to do here is ask the vendor for a properly constructed setup file which provides command line parameters, INI files, or another convenient mechanism to reach your objective at least effort to you.