We distribute our product directly to the retail public and it has been very important for our tech support department to be able to go directly to a log file if a user has had a problem with installation (vs asking them to rerun the install with a command line to get a log file.) That's great for a Vista install but a problem with 2K and XP, which we still support.
Half of our business is done through a CD so logging from that is not a problem but the other half is a download from our website. What I have done in the past is simply wrap the setup in a skeleton InstallScript project that does nothing but launch the app. I was hoping to not do that this year. Does anyone have a better idea/tool that they use to deal with this situation?
If you are using a setup.exe build, you can set command line arguments for it to pass to msiexec, without requiring a separate InstallScript project wrapper. If you're using a raw MSI file, there's not much you can do.
Thanks for the response Michael. I know I can put a hard path in there like /l*v C:\Test\test.log. That works great. But what if I want to put the log file in say the INSTALLDIR or CommonFiles? None of these directories have been resolved until we get into the msi file which is too late by then. So my quandry has always been how to resolve the location of the log file using this option before sending in the command line. Am I just missing something obvious? Wounldn't be the first time. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
INSTALLDIR is not generally possible, however anything that can be safely identified by environment variables can be used. For example, one might use "%TEMP%\MyProduct.log"
