I inherited an installer from a past colleague and I have some questions around how he implemented the registering of some COM components (DLL and OCX files). He pushed them out to their own respective merge modules, created custom actions that execute regsvr32.exe on the files (one for installing and one for uninstalling with /u), and then included them in the main installer and calls these custom actions in the main installer.
If this behavior needed for COM components? Is there an better and/or easier way to do this? I know Installshield supports COM extraction during the build process... would that be better than calling this EXE?
I'm trying to tidy up some of the stuff in it as well as fixing defects and there have been a few around this where, if the installer fails for whatever reason and rollback occurs, these register/unregister CAs fail.... and worse, if the file is removed for whatever reason, the application won't uninstall at all because it can't unregister the file!
Good instincts! If COM extraction works in your situation, it's preferable to running regsvr32 for (among other things) the reason you mention: no automatic rollback for installation or uninstallation...
