Modifying Text In Installshield's 'Preparing To Install...' Dialog

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Summary

This article talks about how to modify the, "Preparing to Install" dialog text.

Synopsis

It is possible to change the text messages on Installshield's, "Preparing To Install" dialog that appears when the setup is run via the Setup.exe bootstrap launcher?

Discussion

This dialog is displayed by the bootstrap launcher and, thus, does not appear in the project in the InstallShield Dialog Editor. There are no InstallScript or MSI settings backing up this dialog.

Nevertheless, the strings appearing on the dialog can be modified through the string resource files that are created in the release's DISK1 output directory. A separate string resource file is created for each language that your setup supports. The name of each resource file is based on the hexadecimal representation of the numerical language ID for a given language. For example, a project that supports English has a language ID of 1033 decimal. A file named "0x0409.ini" is created in the build output directory (0409 hex is 1033 decimal). To modify the string resource files for all builds, go to the Support directory located under InstallShield's installation directory. Changing the files in the Support directory will also allow for changes to be made in a compressed build.

This file is a text file that contains a listing of strings that are used by the .exe bootstrap launcher. You can modify any of the strings appearing in this file, and those changes appear on the dialog.

Additional Information

Note that MSI projects created will usually contain a dialog named Setup Initialization by default. This dialog is not the dialog referred to in this article. The Setup Initialization dialog is usually only briefly visible after the Preparing To Install dialog and can be safely removed from a Basic MSI project.

It is not possible to add, remove, or change the layout of controls on the Preparing To Install dialog. Only the text strings appearing on it may be modified.

For more information on the user interface, refer to the InstallShield Help Library topic User Interface.

For more information on dialogs, refer to the InstallShield Help Library topics Working with Dialogs in InstallScript and InstallScript MSI Projects and Working with Dialogs in Basic MSI Projects.