Silent Install with Feature Prerequisites

[loralynne]

I have a basic MSI that has feature prerequisites. I discovered that if I run a silent installation from a working directory other than where Setup.exe is located, none of the prerequisites get installed. For example, if Setup.exe is located in C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\Disk1 and I run the following command from C:\, the prerequisites do not get installed:

C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\Disk1\Setup.exe /s /v/qn

If I first cd to C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\Disk1 and then run the above command (or run it without specifying the full path to Setup.exe), the prerequisites do get installed.

This does not happen with setup prerequisites, only feature prerequisites.

Is this a known issue, and is this fixed in IS 2011?

[Reureu]

Hi,

It is because the custom action "ISInstallPrerequisites" only appears in the InstallUISequence, hence your prerequisite only gets installed when the InstallUISequence is executed.

It was discussed in another thread a while ago:
http://community.flexerasoftware.com/showthread.php?t=190393

If your customers have to launch setup.exe to install your product in silent mode, then you don't have to use feature prerequisites: Indeed, if you don't link your prerequisite with a feature, the setup.exe itself will install your prerequisite before launching the installation of your MSI package.

I hope that helps.

[loralynne]

No, it works fine if I run the silent install from the directory that Setup.exe is in. If Setup.exe is located in C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\Disk1, then the following works:

C:\>cd C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\Disk1
C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\Disk1>Setup.exe /s /v/qn

However, the following does NOT work:

C:\>C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\Disk1\Setup.exe /s /v/qn

[Reureu]

Sorry, I misunderstood your first post.
As far as I know, the /qn will bypass the InstallUISequence, which means your feature prerequisite won't be installed, but this is not the subject of your thread, is it?

So, you can try to log the installation when started from the root of your C drive:

C:\>C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\Disk1\Setup.exe /s /v"/qn /Lv*x C:\Logfile.log"

Then look for "ISInstallPrerequisites" in the log file and see if this custom action aborts for any reason.

[loralynne]

No, that's not the subject of my thread. But thanks anyway for trying to help.

Actually, the /debuglog flag is probably more useful. In the log file, it says:

9-28-2010[12:38:22 PM]: Error applying transform '1033.MST' for Costing: 110
9-28-2010[12:38:22 PM]: Installing silent prerequisites for features:
9-28-2010[12:38:22 PM]: Install does not use script
9-28-2010[12:38:22 PM]: Install does not use script

These don't appear in the log file when I run the install from the setup.exe directory.

[Reureu]

It must be a bug, then!
Where are your prerequisites located?
Are they in the ISSetupPrerequisites subfolder, which is located in your output folder?

If that's the case, can you try to place this ISSetupPrerequisites folder in the root of your C: drive, and launch the same setup command again?

I suppose IS looks for this folder in the current working directory instead of the setup.exe folder...

[loralynne]

Yeah, they're in the ISSetupPrerequisites folder. Copying it to the working directory didn't fix the problem.

I'm going to open a new incident for this.

Thanks again.

[Reureu]

Ok, I'm curious to hear what Flexera has to say about this issue.
Any chance you can keep us updated about a possible fix/workaround?

[loralynne]

Sure, I'll do that. I opened incident # SIOC-000099873 a couple days ago, and all I've received from them so far is confirmation that someone in tech support has been assigned this issue.

[loralynne]

Tech support was finally able to consistently reproduce the bug. Here's part of the response from them I received this morning:

In conclusion, the problem seems to exist on all Windows Operating systems, with projects built with IS 2010 or IS 2011, and the problem is feature prerequisites do not get installed during a silent install of a multi-lingual install package when working directory is not the setup directory.

I have reported this problem as issue number IOA-000058597. There is no time estimate when a fix will be available.

For an immediate work around, I recommend the silent install of the main install be launched with an MSI command line argument that passes in a language transform, such as:

"C:\InstallShield 2011 Projects\SilentPRQ\Config\Base\DiskImages\DISK1\setup" /s /v"/qb TRANSFORMS=\"C:\InstallShield 2011 Projects\SilentPRQ\Config\Base\DiskImages\DISK\1033.mst"

[Reureu]

Loralynne,

Thanks for the update.

Interesting to see that it is somehow related to the language transform files.

Also interesting to see that they do not commit to delivering a patch.