Yesterday I watched the webinar, because I was very curious about what I could do with the suite installation type. I hoped that I could bring together several installation packages into a nice user interface where our customer can easily check or uncheck the different packages and is guided through a installation sequence.
But I struggled into several problems: 1) In most cases the packages aren't compressed, the always have a setup.exe file. So I added setup.exe and selected the option "Add Adjacent Files and Files in Subfolders". I thought, it would only take the relative path with an attribut that tells the suite to include all files when building the release, like the dynamic linking does it in a installation project. But I see all files listed in the .ssuite-file. That would mean if there are more or less files/folder in another release the build will fail. 2) Projects build MS Visual Studio (c# and .Net) have often long path names: Build fails with error -1007 3) I can't find an edit-function to change the included file of a package
As far as I can see, the Suite would perhaps work if I could use single exe or msi files. Perhaps the user manual is not detailed enough.
Thanks for this feedback! We want to make sure our Suite projects do serve the needs you already have; where they do not, we want to increase the Suite project's capability set. So with that in mind, here's some guidance related to your questions.
(1) We do not yet have support for dynamic file links in suite packages. It is high on our priority list, but did not make the initial release. I hope to see this functionality added in a service pack, but I can't guarantee this will happen. In the meantime, the options to add files do indeed add them as a static link.
(2) How long are the paths you're working with? Can you work around this by compressing the package's files? Or can you shorten the paths you're working with? If you can give me an example source and destination path, we can look into this and see if there's anything we can make better on our end.
(3) You can edit the list of files included in a package by clicking on the folders below the package, and adding or removing files in the list on the right. Is that what you're looking for?
Hi Michael, We build a suite project. It adds the package Id "{CA9189A3-CABF-4895-9341-C10A3E83118A}" as sub folder. The installation on Windows 2008 R2 works fine. But it fails on Windows 2003 x64 SP1. It cannot find the file "C:\Disk1\{CA9189A3-CABF-4895-9341-C10A3E83118A}\program files\AAA Technology\Dot Net Application Adapter\AAADotNetAdapterWebService\bin\contactassociateddatamanagement.asmx.cdcab7d2.compiled". If we execute the package setup.exe under subfolder "{CA9189A3-CABF-4895-9341-C10A3E83118A}". It installs successfully.
We cannot shorten the path or file name as it is compiled by VS 2005. Do you have any idea to fix this issue? We use InstallShield 2012 Spring - Premier Edition with Virtualization Pack Version 19.
You can shorten the length of that path slightly by changing the package folder's GUID name to a shorter one. In IS2012 Spring you can do this in the IDE, but in IS 2012 you'll have to directly edit the .issuite xml file: Look for the Folder element with the Name attribute containing that GUID; replace the attribute with a shorter value, and rebuild your project.
