I'm attempting to use the Windows Installer 4.5 "chained MSIs" feature using InstallShield 2009, but have been encountering problems. If I set them to stream into the project, I invariably get an error at build time - "Cannot save target databse" (sic). It's not a show-stopper as I can always include the MSIs as components and run them from the temp folder, but it would be nice not to have odd files lying around on the target machine. Can anyone help?
I'm scraping my memory here, but I think that error may have been caused by unfortunate choices of package names. I don't remember if it was a length issue, or invalid character issue. If you try renaming the labels in the releases view under Chained .msi packages to short letters-and-numbers-no-spaces names, this would probably go away. (For instance try "msxml3" to replace something like "Microsoft XML 3 Redistributable Package".)
These names are only used internally, so do not have any impact on the install, so it is safe to change them. Unfortunately IS2009 doesn't detect the names that will cause problems and prevent you from choosing them.
Thanks for the reply - problem solved 🙂 My names already didn't contain any spaces so I knew this wouldn't be the issue, but after some experimentation I've found the limit to be 9 characters - any more than this and the build fails with the aforementioned error.
