InstallShield MSI Creation on Dev PC Works But on Build Server Fails to Include Certain Dependent DLLs in MSI

Yes

Summary

This article is about including dependent files to avoid missing dependencies after build.

Synopsis

This article is about including dependent files to avoid missing dependencies after build. A file often relies on functions in other files to perform a task. However, you may not be aware of all these other files?known as dependencies?when you include your application?s files in your installation project.

Discussion

When you have a requirement to include files (including dependent files for the files) in your project the best practice as setup author is to explicitly include the files needed for your release to work.

Under some circumstances your build process may include a difference (different files) from one build machine compared to another build machine. For example computer A builds setup 1 with n-number of files and computer B builds setup with a different number of files. This discrepancy is determined after build when examining the built MSI database.

When you are relying on file dependencies to include files in the InstallShield project it is possible the missing file(s) are not registered on the build client. When dependencies are marked for inclusion based on being a dependency within an InstallShield project the file(s) are expected to be written to memory. As a result the build process includes the file(s) in the build as you expect. If the file does not exist (physically) or is prohibited from being read into memory during build you may get less than expected results.

During the handling of dependencies if the main assembly has a dependency and the file is not there to be consumed at build there is no error thrown. Therefore it is important to include the files needed in your project explicitly.

Additional Information

InstallShield offers Static Scanning and Dynamic Scanning wizards to assist you in identifying and working with these files. You can access these scanners in the Dependency Scanners view.

However, the reason for this article is to inform you can explicitly include your file dependencies and avoid relying on the Dependency Scanners.

InstallShield MSI Creation on Dev PC Works But on Build Server Fails to Include Certain Dependent DLLs in MSI