InstallAware

What's wrong with the following code?
It assumes that the "Extract Full File Name"(ExtractPath) command contains actual filesystem logic (like e.g. boost::filesystem), not just a single string operation.
The variable LicTmpName contains the trailing parentheses. I have to manually remove them to use the filename afterwards. This led to a bug that took a bit of work to find.
I think that should be done in the "Extract Full File Name"(ExtractPath) path command. (Or the command be renamed to ReturnEverythingAfterTheLastBackslash

Can you give the debugger output of variables as you are stepping through this code?

Hi Michael,

sure...
LicenseNames="C:\Program Files (x86)\PointLine21\UserDat\lic\default\PointLine3D.lic"|"C:\Program Files (x86)\PointLine21\UserDat\lic\floating\PointLine3D.lic"
LicenseNames="C:\Program Files (x86)\PointLine21\UserDat\lic\floating\PointLine3D.lic"
LicTmpName="C:\Program Files (x86)\PointLine21\UserDat\lic\default\PointLine3D.lic"
LicTmpName=PointLine3D.lic"

what I would expect is:
LicTmpName=PointLine3D.lic


Rgds
Richard

Ah, I see what you mean. So it is an issue of the trailing quote. You will want to remove those explicitly using Replace String before making a call to Extract Path. Extract Path does not analyze quotes but analyzes back-slashes only. Since Find All Files wraps return values inside double quotes, you will need to take them out before further processing.

Yes, Replace String was what I did in the end. But it's a bit counter intuitive, that's why I report it here.
"Extract Full File Name" sounds like it's aware of what it deals with. Instead it's just a simple find and substring operation.
In contrast other filesystem abstractions like boost::filesystem deal with these things.
Handling with filenames has so many special cases, and if one has to handle these manually, there's not much point in using provided functions that I don't know which ones they handle and which ones not. If the command doesn't care about the special cases, then ReturnEverythingAfterTheLastBackslash might be a better name for it.
It's not something that needs an urgent fix, but I think other users could benefit if potential problems are taken care of for them.
For the moment I work around the problem, but in the long run I prefer to have them fixed at the root. Be it for version 10 or 11...

Rgds
Richard

Actually the long term plan is to have commands like Find All Files start a processing loop all on their own (like while...end) So there would be even less parsing for you to do in the script.

That sounds good. Does that mean real while and for loops, so that we no longer have to do loops with goto's?
Do you have a teaser to show?

Yes, these will be coming in the InstallAware 11 time frame. Loops did not make sense for as long as we did not have our own native setup engine - because only the last iteration of each loop could be executed by MSI. Now this restriction is being removed by InstallAware 10.