Variable SETUPEXEDIR returns blank when running a Patch Update

Summary

Discussion of a variable representing the Update.exe name during initialization.

Synopsis

Trying to obtain the equivalent of SETUPEXENAME for the Update.exe for a Patch Update is not nativly supported. Furthermore, the variable SETUPEXEDIR returns blank when running a MSI based patch.

Discussion

SETUPEXEDIR is an alternative to the directory identifier SourceDir. A potential problem with using SourceDir is that it points to the location of the running .msi package. In the case of a compressed installation, the .msi package is streamed to a temporary location and run from there. Because of this, the value of SourceDir will be some temporary location on the end user?s machine, which might not be the value that you want.

The CURRENTDIRECTORY property will likely return the directory where the Update.exe is but not its name.

Workaround

Use custom .Net to examine every process to look for a process name of "msiexec" and then into their Command Line parameter to check for SETUPEXENAME and SETUPEXEDIR which are used to start the process.

Find the current process using the System.Diagnostics Namespace yields the msiexec.exe process which is fired from the setup.exe. This is not expected to yield the SETUPEXENAME or the SETUPEXEDIR.

Variable SETUPEXEDIR returns blank when running a Patch Update