I'm a complete newbie to Installshield having so far maintained our installers using the MSI projects in visual studio. So i may just be laboring under false assumptions and general ignorance, but so far the documentation has not enlightened me. If there is some documentation that i've missed, please point me to it.
That said, here is the scenario. We currently have a number of Merge Modules that are combined in different ways to create several different installers. We use multiple installers rather than one installer with many Features, because of size and capability constraints (think vertical versions). The whole thing is automated of our builds using Cruisecontrol.
My plan was to create these merge modules as IS Objects and then combine them in a number of IS MSI projects. So far so good, I have a number of objects and after building these objects can be seen in each other's Objects view. However the MSI does not have an Objects view, just Redistributables and I cannot figure out how to get my objects to show up there. I even used the "Install option" in VS which claimed it registered the object.
My questions are: 1) Should i be building my installers in this fashion or can i create a single installer project that can spit out multiple installers with only certain features? 2) If i am on the right path with objects and MSIs, how do i get my MSI to see my object 3) If i rebuild the object do i have to re-register it again? I am asking because it's likely to affect how cruisecontrol will be able to handle the automation.
InstallScript MSI projects cannot view or include InstallScript Objects. There used to be a feature called InstallScript MSI Object; however, that functionality was rolled into the regular Merge Module project after the architecture improvements in 12.
If you wanted to use a single project with multiple possible build outputs, you could take a look at Release Flags with multiple releases & configurations as well.
thanks for information. I've switched to using InstallScript Project for the installer referencing InstallScript objects and that seems like a good way to handle things. But i guess using installscript, i preclude myself from using a single project to create multiple installers, since release flags seem to be limited to MSI projects?
