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DonAIR
Level 6

Suite Installer Question

New to Suite Installers and we are looking to use them to help our build times. To better understand our need, our current data package is an installscript package that compresses to 450 and 400GB (2 different packages). These take about 30 hours to build, its compressing 2 TBs of data. These files change every build, but usually its only one or two and we want to structure this into about 50 sets each so we only need to build the one set that changes and will decrease build time significantly. That said, to do this we need a wrapper installer for it.

So my first question is any solid paperwork/how tos/youtube videos on setting up suite installers and linking the variables back to the other installers?
More importantly, my second question is when building the suite installer how do you tell it not to package the installers in it? It wont save us any time if we need to package the compressed model packages every time we build the suite installer. My assumption was it sat "outside" so to speak of the installer. So you launch the suite installer and it just kicks off the files sitting outside of it... is this not the case?
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chad_petersen
Level 9

When you click on each package in the Suite UI you should have choices

"Copy From Source Media"
"Extract From Setup.exe"
"Download From The Web"


The first choice (which seems to be the default for me) seems like the choice you would want. It will put each package into a subfolder of its own outside of the Setup.exe using a unique folder name to put them in so that Setup.exe knows what to look for.

What I'm confused about though is your claimed sizes are vastly larger than the maximum sizes allowed for a single file as well as the size of a CAB file. Some good info at this web site.

http://www.installsite.org/pages/en/msifaq/a/1043.htm

Chad

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DonAIR
Level 6

chad.petersen wrote:
When you click on each package in the Suite UI you should have choices

"Copy From Source Media"
"Extract From Setup.exe"
"Download From The Web"


The first choice (which seems to be the default for me) seems like the choice you would want. It will put each package into a subfolder of its own outside of the Setup.exe using a unique folder name to put them in so that Setup.exe knows what to look for.

What I'm confused about though is your claimed sizes are vastly larger than the maximum sizes allowed for a single file as well as the size of a CAB file. Some good info at this web site.

http://www.installsite.org/pages/en/msifaq/a/1043.htm

Chad


I didn't let it go for hours, but I used Copy From Source Media and it seemed to not be a quick thing... almost like it was "packaging" it so to speak.

The file size limitation is an MSI thing, so InstallScript projects can have larger cabs, ours are 17GB each. We definitely can't compress the files into msi capable cabs for sure.
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chad_petersen
Level 9

Ah, yes, you are using the old InstallScript-only project type.

It is going to copy each package into their own folders from wherever it is picking them up from. I'd imaging copying that much data would take some time.

Chad
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DonAIR
Level 6

chad.petersen wrote:
Ah, yes, you are using the old InstallScript-only project type.

It is going to copy each package into their own folders from wherever it is picking them up from. I'd imaging copying that much data would take some time.

Chad


It does (although still a lot less that rebuilding the package from scratch). More importantly though, why can't I overwrite the copied data manually? As in, if I don't have to re-build the single installer, why bother when I can just copy the files in. I just tried this and it still installed the files it though it should. I am not even sure how thats physically possible lol.
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DonAIR
Level 6

chad.petersen wrote:
Ah, yes, you are using the old InstallScript-only project type.

It is going to copy each package into their own folders from wherever it is picking them up from. I'd imaging copying that much data would take some time.

Chad


We figured out my copy issue, I had to turn of cache path.

That said, for some reason each component installs properly but I always get a "failure to install, would you like to continue" message. It also launched prior to the exe being kicked off it seems... Thoughts on what that could even be?
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DLee65
Level 13

Hi Don,

InstallShield SUITE has the concept of packages. There are two types of packages, dependent packages, and primary packages.
From the chain of messages, it appears you have a pure InstallScript installer to handle the large file issue mentioned.
The suite installer should have an 'eligibility condition' that it evaluates to see if the package is installed.

The first thing to check is your InstallScript package and verify that it is set as the primary package.

Second check the 'Eligibility Condition' for this package in your suite project file. Take your Product Code and Product Version and verify that both are set correctly on the test machine and that the condition evaluates to true correctly based on your Comparison. These values should be located in the registry.

I haven't worked with InstallScript packages directly yet, but this is the expected behavior of any primary package. At the end of install it checks this condition and if it is false it should display the message you indicate.
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