I'm installing 10 .NET services in our basic MSI project, and was hoping to utilize ActionData to inform the user as to progress beyond the "Installing Services" that already displays. To my surprise, the Windows Installer help says "There are no ActionData messages."
However, under ActionText in Custom Actions and Sequences view, there is an InstallServices item and it lists Service: [2] as the template. Is there any way to utilize this, or is this a typo in the editor?
I don't know the answer from memory, but if you have the project with 10 services already set up, a quick way to test is to change the InstallServices action data to something you'd notice, like "!!!!!!! InstallServices [1] [2] [3] [4] !!!!!!!!!"
If you see anything during the installation, you'll know something is displayed for that action and can narrow it down; if not, the good news (I suppose) is that StartServices, StopServices, and DeleteServices do have ActionData defined, and those generally take much longer to run...
Thanks for that nifty trick, Robert; the service name indeed shows with [1]. I'd already had their names dispalying for starting and stopping but during InstallServices it just showed Services: for about 10 seconds and wanted to do by my users a little better.
So looks like both the Microsoft documentation for InstallServices ActionData is wrong AND the default InstallShield template of Service: [2]. Or does anyone know if the ActionData that is displaying is an IS-specific custom action, in which case it's just the template that needs tweaking?
I'm fairly confident there's no InstallShield custom action setting the ActionData, so it would appear to be a Windows Installer documentation omission. I'm not sure where the ActionData value in the project template came from, though.
