Administrative installs do not include the setup prerequisites

[DLee65]

I have to admit that I expected this behavior in my testing. This is just more of a warning to document your installation process well and let administrators know that they have to manually copy the setup prerequisite folder and the setup.exe to the target destination for the prerequisites to install properly.

In my test I extracted our compressed XMap application to another directory. I then went to the directory and ran the msi directly. I was prompted by the setup that there were prerequisites required and it gave me the option to browse for the original Setup.exe. However, for many of our customers, they will push the application out using Group Policy and it will be unattended. So the prerequisites need to be present in the same directory as the uncompressed setup.

[DebbieL]

Have you tried specifying a path as part of the /a parameter, as documented in the Setup.exe and Update.exe Command-Line Parameters help topic?

I haven't tried it, but it seems like it might be easier to do that than to manually copy over the prerequisites in some cases.

Just an idea.

[DLee65]

You know with all my years of working with InstallShield I never ever picked up on that option.

I agree this is a much better solution. Time to update our instructions that we send out with our network packages. 🙂 Thanks for the tip.

[LanceRas]

Missed that too. Thats a nice find.

[DLee65]

Well I tried this process and it did not work. Yes, it did extract the data but the setup.exe and the prerequisites were not copied to the directory.

Did I do something wrong?

Here is the command line I used: \\\\setup.exe /a"C:\Public\Apps\"

From what I can see, my command line is the same as what is online.

The /a option causes Setup.exe to perform an administrative installation. An administrative installation copies (and uncompresses) your data files to a directory specified by the user, but it does not create shortcuts, register COM servers, or create an uninstallation log.
Tip

If an installation contains InstallShield prerequisites and you want to extract them from Setup.exe, add a path after the /a parameter to extract the prerequisites to that location. A sample command is Setup.exe /a"C:\temp".

Note that in our setups I leave the prerequisites uncompressed, perhaps this is the difference. I will try a build with the prerequisites compressed and see what happens. Still I would have expected the setup.exe to be copied across.

[DLee65]

I tried compressing the prerequisites into the setup.exe and while passing in /a to the setup.exe does extract all the prerequisites to the specified target, it does not move the setup.exe itself which is required for feature prerequisites.

So we are still left with my prior documentation - manually copy the setup.exe and the ISSetupPrerequisites directory and its contents to the same location as the MSI is located.

[DebbieL]

Sorry about that! I created issue IOC-000072341 for this. Just to clarify: It sounds like specifying /a plus the path should extract/copy any prerequisites over to the path, regardless of whether they are compressed into Setup.exe or left uncompressed. It should also copy over the Setup.exe file if the installation includes feature prerequisites. Does that sound correct?

Thanks,
Debbie Landers
Acresso Software

[DLee65]

Debbie,

That is what I thought too. However, it did not work that way. If the prerequisites are already uncompressed it just skips the copy process and starts the MSI.

[DebbieL]

Got it. Thanks for the confirmation!