Command line build set Setup Prerequisites Location
I'm building my InstallShield MSI Installscript project from the command line and I would like to set the "Setup Prerequisites Location" property in the Releases view to be "Extract From Setup.exe" but I can't figure out a way to do this. The default value always seems to be "Copy From Source Media" and I need to change this from the command line. I've tried adding a -z ISSetupPrerequisiteLocation=1 to the command line build but that doesn't seem to be working.
I don't believe there is a command line option for this. If you cannot pre-configure a release with the settings you desire, I don't think there is currently a supported way to do this, as I do not see the option exposed on the ISWiRelease object either. However if you are careful and observant, perhaps you could look at the differences in the ISRelease* tables when you toggle the setting and write either MSI automation or XML automation (depending on your saved file format) to tweak this directly.
Still, if at all possible, I recommend pre-configuring a release and selecting that at the command line - it'd be a lot simpler.
What you've said made me think a little about the way I was doing my builds. I have automated builds which builds the install project and creates a new release configuration on each build with the -r flag. I'm thinking this is probably the wrong way of doing things. I've reconfigured things to use a release configuration with the major.minor number as the name and just change the version on each build by passing in the -y major.minor.build parameter. Then when I have a new release in which the major.minor number changes, I can preconfigure a new release from the IDE before doing any automated builds.
Does this seem like the correct way of doing it? Any suggestions would be appreciated.
While I'm hesitant to try to claim one way is better or worse (different businesses prioritize different things), it sure sounds like this approach will work more easily with InstallShield than the previous. So from that perspective it sounds like the right choice - it's straightforward, doesn't litter your release view with releases you'll never use again, and uses the configuration options you want.
Another thing you might want to consider - I was doing something very similar to what you propose - pre-configuring a release for each major.minor build number. But we have over 89 merge modules in over 25 MSI projects, and it was taking me hours to change all that when we had a change in major.minor version. I recently decided that, since we save our projects in a source control system and cut off the tree when a major.minor build changes, there is really no need for me to version the configurations. So I simply named a single release for each with the settings I want on it. It saves me a ton of time when we finish a release and start on the next one.
