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ashw_r
Level 3

Standalone uninstaller

Hi Everyone, we are using IA 2011 Enterprise edition and wish to create a standalone uninstaller for our J2EE apps. By standalone I mean, an uninstall exe created during the build phase similar to an installer. IA does create an uninstaller following a successful installation but deletes it after it is run once. My need is for the uninstaller to be present always.

Reason for this is that, the installation of the application is multi-part and is spread across multiple machines. Typical flow -

1. User logs in to the database machine and asks the installer to only apply the database scripts
2. He then transfers the installer to the LDAP machine and configures only the LDAP
3. Finally, transfers the installer to the application server machine and deploys the EARs and WARs.

As you might have figured out, I haven't enabled a 'remote or single click' installation but rather require the user to run the installer multiple times on appropriate boxes, asking the installer to carry out tasks specific to that box.

So what follows is for the uninstaller to support a multi-part uninstallation - which is why I need a separate executable for the uninstaller generated via the build process.
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jerome_IA
Level 9

Hi,

I'm not sure I understood all your needs, but you may use the partial uninstaller (Choose Feature to Uninstall) panel available in Pre-Uninstall phase actions.

Otherwise, you may also have a look to $SKIP_UNINSTALL$ variable (check documentation about it) which will allow you to do some uninstall actions but keeps the uninstall executable.

--Jerome
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madhavbantwal
Level 6

Hi ashw_r,

InstallAnywhere does not provide a Standalone Uninstaller.

Uninstaller gets installed as a part of installation itself.

Thanks,
Madhav Pai
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ashw_r
Level 3

Thanks jerome_IA and madhavbantwal for your replies. For the benefit of others, we decided to implement it this way -

1. Moved all the uninstall actions to the pre-uninstall phase
2. Set the $SKIP_UNINSTALL$ to true always

This way the uninstaller exe never got deleted which sort of solved my purpose. There was a drawback in this approach - the user never see an "Uninstall" button. Only the "next" and "previous" buttons are displayed and finally a "done" button to signify the end of the install.
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jerome_IA
Level 9

ashw_r wrote:
Thanks jerome_IA and madhavbantwal for your replies. For the benefit of others, we decided to implement it this way -

1. Moved all the uninstall actions to the pre-uninstall phase
2. Set the $SKIP_UNINSTALL$ to true always

This way the uninstaller exe never got deleted which sort of solved my purpose. There was a drawback in this approach - the user never see an "Uninstall" button. Only the "next" and "previous" buttons are displayed and finally a "done" button to signify the end of the install.


There is a minor issue with the $SKIP_UNINSTALL$:
=> When ran in console mode, at least PRODUCT_NAME variable is not resolved in Uninstall Complete message. So you may have this displayed:
"All items were successfully uninstalled.$PRODUCT_NAME$"

--Jerome
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ashw_r
Level 3

I didn't notice this particularly but it wasn't a deterrent as I overrode the static text under resources/i18n to display a customized message.

jerome_IA wrote:
There is a minor issue with the $SKIP_UNINSTALL$:
=> When ran in console mode, at least PRODUCT_NAME variable is not resolved in Uninstall Complete message. So you may have this displayed:
"All items were successfully uninstalled.$PRODUCT_NAME$"

--Jerome
0 Kudos