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jstarbird
Level 5

Shortcuts - Basic MSI - at run time

Is there really no way to change the Displayname or Description of a Shortcut in a Basic MSI at run time? That seems to be the most simple, obvious, needed thing for any installer so why would you not be able to do that?
I've had to result to using AddFolderIcon and do a lot of extra coding for something that should be so simple. But now with that I'm running into yet another issue. I don't see a way to change the Description of the shortcuts. This is very important for us to accomplish as it allows us to put info in that appears to the user when they Hover over the shortcut.
So is there some way to do this???? I know it seems trivial but we want to use this to show the user a URL instead of making the Shortuct name the URL that is used for our program to run. They can end up with multiple versions pointing to different servers is why we want this.

I can't believe AddFolderIcon doesn't have a direct way to do this has been around for a very long time.


Thanks,
J
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jstarbird
Level 5

I finally found something suggesting to search on "shortcut formatted" which resulted in this find:
http://community.flexerasoftware.com/showthread.php?t=182498&highlight=shortcut+formatted

So I'll give that a try. I do think that by now IS would have this functionality built in. Just a pre-done InstallScript custom action that people could add instead of having to do this silly extra coding for something that should be so simple.


Thanks,
J
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Christopher_Pai
Level 16

It's a limitation of MSI that the ShortCut tables Name column isn't type formatted. I'm guessing this has something to do with ShortCut advertisement but I don't know that for sure.

It is annoying because it's useful to transform a shortcut name on the desktop during multiple instance installs.

There are 3 work arounds I know:

1) Don't change the name, change the destination directory.
2) Update the MSI database during runtime to trick MSI into creating a different named shortcut
3) Use InstallScript ( or other languages ) to create custom actions for creating and removing shortcuts.
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jstarbird
Level 5

Thanks. Yeah I know it's a limitation of MSI which I can sort of understand for the name since they use that for the Filename but why can't I modify the Description? In MSI or InstallScript?? Makes zero sense there.

Well anyway, I've tried using the code I've found and cannot get any of it to work. Basically it can never seem to access the Shortcut table, I get access to the MSI database fine but it fails when I try to create an object of the Shortcut table.
Does anyone have a truly working example they can post here preferrable in InstallScript?
Or if you can point me to a post of code you know works that would be great as well. Here is one of the links I tried:

This one was incomplete and I tried to work it out but couldn't get it to work. It's missing some function called MSICreateView.
http://community.flexerasoftware.com/showthread.php?t=182498&highlight=createappshortcuts

I cannot find the other one I found, that code was Deleting the shortcut from the table and then recreating it.

What would be really nice is if the InstallShield folks would have an online repository of these scripts so when new users or, like me, returning old users can quickly find solutions. Now unless I search the exact right phrase I may not find what I'm looking for and if I post I have wait for someone to respond. If they kept a repository they could make sure they are following a nice standard of coding, all the error catching, etc., and that would reduce their support calls by a lot.


Thanks,
J
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