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gcggcg
Level 4

Feature Order

I'm having difficulty with setting the order that features are displayed. My understanding was that the display order could be set in either the Features view or the Setup Design view by using Move Up or Move Down or the keyboard shortcuts.

What I'm finding is that regardless of how I rearrange them, they're shown in a different order in the Feature view than in the Setup Design view and when I change the order in one of the views it affects the order in the other view in an unpredictable way.

Shouldn't the order be the same in both views and shouldn't a change in one view show up just the same in the other view? Am I doing something wrong here?
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skolte
Level 7

The order of the features displayed in Feature Window is set by using Move up / Down keys as suggested here.

Have you migrated this project from an older version? Or is this a new project?

I had seen similar issues when I upgraded from 11 to InstallShield 12. Earlier I edited the .ism manually but later I resorted to creating a new project and the issues went away.
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gcggcg
Level 4

I have used the Move Up and Move Down keys to reorder the features. I'm able to move them up and down, as expected, in both the Setup Design view and the Features view. However, the ordering of the features ends up different in each of these views and it's different still in the Custom install dialog when I run the installer. When I change the order in, say, the Features view and then look at the Setup Design view, the ordering there has been changed also but in a very unpredictable way.

I have manually migrated this project from IS 7.1 by copy/paste -ing the tables so I suspected it was my error. But then I created a new project directly in 2012 and see the very same behavior.

When I look at the Display column of the Features table I see that the value shows up for multiple features. That seems wrong to me but perhaps I'm misinterpreting what the value means.
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skolte
Level 7

Interesting.. I don't see that behavior at all when I create a new project. The feature order in Setup Design view remains same in Features view as well. And this is maintained on Setup Features Tree when I run the installer (displayed by SelectFeaturesForDisplay() in InstallScript).

Can you possibly try to create a sample with 3 features (NewFeature1, NewFeature2, NewFeature3)? See this is what I get...

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gcggcg
Level 4

First, thanks so much for all of your input on this - it is very helpful and much appreciated!

Second, I'm somewhat confused now. Your results are exactly what I would have expected. I've gone back to the two applications that I have seen the problem on - one a brand new project and one imported manually from IS 7.1. In the past both of them exhibited the behavior I described but now I'm seeing the new project behave in the way I'd expect whereas the converted project does not. I've been careful in the past to try this out on both to make sure they both behaved the same, and they did. So I can't explain why it's different now.

I noticed this time that the Display column of the Features table contains no duplicate values for the new project but still contains duplicate values for the converted project. I have to think that's at the core of the issue. Perhaps I should hand edit those values to be distinct. Any thoughts on that approach?

Thanks again!
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skolte
Level 7

You are welcome. I am glad I could offer some help.

Before you play with Feature table, make a backup copy of your project. You are right, it seems logical that duplicate entries could cause this issue.

Secondly, if you still have access to IS 7.1, create a new project there with 3 features, run it to make sure it shows the screens as expected, now convert it to IS 2012, see if you can still reproduce the issue or it works fine. If you can, you can send it to InstallShield techsupport so that they can fix the bug and may be give you a hotfix.
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gcggcg
Level 4

Hi SK,

Thanks for the good advice. I have finally figured out what is going on. The project that we converted from IS7 has about 70 features. Many of them are configured to be non-visible. It turns out that the Display value (in the Feature table) for an invisible feature is 0 whereas the values for visible features are all greater than zero. When the list of features are displayed in either the Features view or the Setup Design view, the invisible features show up at the top of the list (value of 0). I guess this is reasonable though it seems to differ from older behavior.

The problem is that if you are in either the Feature or Setup Design view and use Up to move a visible feature up the feature list, you can move it right up into the invisible group. Again, maybe that's OK. However, if you switch to the other view, the feature will only have moved up to the bottom of the invisible features. So when you look at the order of the features in this case, it's different - the visible feature you moved up to, say, the top of the invisible featues in the Setup Design view will show up at the bottom of the invisible features in the Feature view.

I don't think this behavior is intuitive or what anyone would expect. Once you know how it works you can deal with it but it sure threw me for a loop for quite awhile.

Thanks again for all your help!
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