InstallAware

Hi

The installer of CodeGear (ex Borland) Delphi is InstallAware. Based on that we decided to buy your product and really like it.

But there is one issues that does give me a headache.

After installation (Delphi or our own products) I can find a complete version of the installer (un-7zipped) within

C:\\Documents and Settings\\All Users\\Application Data

My questions are now:

a) what for is his area used (e.g. Repair, MSI)?
b) could this option be turned of (as this are in the case of Delphi >20'000 Files and >1.3 GByte)
c) could this option be relinked to a central drive or CD (we try to keep the Acronis-Saves and as well the Test-VMWares as small as possible.

This question does use "Delphi" as an example. We do have not Installers for our own products with exactly the same problem and try to understand the background and potential solutions.

regards

Günther

As I understand this happens only with web media installers. They cache the whole files in this directory for repairs and patches. It's explained in the whitepaper about patching.

>As I understand this happens only with web media installers.

thank you for the feedback. Good Hint: The white paper "Using InstallAware 7 / To Patch Software Products" does explain rather a lot of the details.

Seems that codegear/borland does use "Patch Source Resolution for Web Deployed Setups" that forces to store the setup files locally (uncompressed).

But I use a "Compressed Single Self-Installing EXE" and have no plans to create any patches. But still the Setup is store locally (but this time compressed). OK. The logic does start to be clear but somehow I miss an option do declare that I do not want to patch my software and therefor the local storage is not necessary).

Background: The setup does deliver a lot of "usage data" (in this case GIS-Maps) that have to be fully replace by each version. No sense to try any patch logic.

The files stored in this folder by IA are the necessary files to managed uninstallation. This is not optional. Moreover, it is not a full version of the installer, it doesn't contain all the files the installer installs. It just contains the uninstall information and custom actions.

OK. I agree that for "non web media installs" I find

instance.dat
mia.lib
setup.dat
setup.exe
setup.msi
setup.par
setup.res

seems to be a "reduced set of necessary uninstall info"
thank you for the details

regards

Günther