In the near future one of our products is going to support a plugin type architecture. Right now I have the installation for our product, and the installation for the first plugin as two seperate Basic MSI projects.
Is there an easy way/best practice to combining these? The plugin installation basically has no UI, and it would be nice to detect if it's there and just install it when it is.
My understanding that the proper way to nest an msi is to use a prerequisite, but since the plugin won't always be shipped with the base product, I'm not sure if that works.
My understanding that the proper way to nest an msi is to use a prerequisite, but since the plugin won't always be shipped with the base product, I'm not sure if that works.
Yes, Prerequisites are preferred to a formal nesting (Microsoft has even deprecated that custom action type).
Here are some Prerequisite features that should be helpful...
Prerequisites can be conditionally included in the build via the use of Release Flags
Prerequisites can either be executed early, 'setup', or late, 'feature.
There are a number of condition types that the Prerequisite engine supports including file, registry, platform, etc.
Please see these help library topics, "InstallShield Prerequisite Editor Reference" and "Setup Prerequisites vs. Feature Prerequisites"
