Installshield 2011 Prerequisite Conditions

[styerr]

I am in the process of trying to port the deployment projects for our product from Visual Studio 2008 (.vdproj) to Installshield 2011 for the first time. Our products has a requirement to have SQL Server 2008 R2 Express RTM installed as a prerequisite. Installshield does provide a Prerequisite for SQL Server 2008 R2 Express RTM but I need to customize it to meet a particular failure consition we have encountered in our customer locations. The customers have computers which have been "locked down" to meet government security policies. In our case, we know of we know of two security policies that cause the SQL Server 2008 R2 install to fail. We would like to be able to test for these two secuirty policy conditions and at the minimum provide a detailed error description to the installing user about the failure and the method to remedy it. I have several questions.

1. The Visual Studio 2008 Prerequisite package allows the package to run a user created application to test conditions before starting the actual install of the prerequisite. Does Installshield provide any mechanism to run a user supplied application as a condition to the prerequisite?
2. Is there any mechanism to define a detailed error message response to the installing user when a prerequisite condition has failed? I would like to be able to supply the error message to meet our condition.
3. Assuming the answer to #1 above is that an application can not be used as a condition, would it be possible to create a dependent prerequisite where we create a new prerequisite that will test for the preexisting condition. If this prerequisite "fails" and could display an error message, then we could make the SQL Server 2008 R2 Express prerequisite dependent on our custom prerequisite. Can I define my own prerequisite that will run a testing application and fail when the security policy problems exist?

I hope my questions are clear enough and that someone will be able to give me guidance on the handling of prerequisites within Installshield. Thank you for any assistance you can provide.

[MichaelU]

InstallShield does not currently offer this in its prerequisites - you can do dependencies, but not custom error messages nor custom conditions. Here are a couple ideas in the current framework that might get you where you want to be.

• You could try to create one prerequisite which, for example, sets a couple registry entries (one to indicate it ran, and one to indicate its result). Then another which checks the result entry as one of its conditions.
  
• You could create a wrapper executable (possibly an InstallScript setup, or custom C++ executable) and edit the SQL Server prerequisite to launch it instead. This executable would perform your additional checks and either launch the normal executable, or exit possibly with a custom message.
  
• You could create a wrapper project (perhaps an InstallScript setup) which handles prerequisites differently, or checks your additional conditions before launching your existing installation.
  

Of these I think I like the middle option the best, as it's localized to the single prerequisite itself. We are also looking at improving this in a future release, but depending on your time frame even the best future solution from us may not help you at this point.

[styerr]

I'll see if I can implement one of these.

[anand_mck]

Hi styerr,

Were you able to get pass this issue? if so, can you please provide the solution?