We have quickpatch project for our minor product update. It is based on existing MSI package.
If this patch is run on a machine which does not have the required product installed, following installshield error is displayed:
1628: Failed to complete installation.
This may sound bit odd but is there any way to customize this message using quickpatch or using msi project from BaseImage folder?
Any help on this will be really appreciable.
Thanks in advance.
Unfortunately 1628 is a fairly generic Windows Installer error, and we don't offer a way to configure its message. I would probably advise just documenting this, and living with the limitation. People aren't generally too surprised that they need the base product in order to patch it.
If you really need a way to control your message, you could look into delivering your .msp using an Advanced UI or a Suite/Advanced UI project. You can create a condition that detects the base package, and use it either as part of the eligibility for the patch package or use it negated as an exit condition (in general information). You can specify a custom message for the exit condition.
Related
I am writing my first WIX installer. The installed application uses various Microsoft standard OCX controls which are installed as merge modules, for example MSCOMCTL.msm, MSFLXGRD.MSM etc.
For some reason, if the target machine has UAC switched on, running the application after installation fails with a message to the effect that "MSCOMCTL is missing or has not been correctly registered...". However, if the application is run once 'As Administrator' it puts up a UAC "can this app make changes" message (so it's obviously changing something) and then runs fine, and what is more runs forever after without admin privs. (Alternatively, registering the relevant controls with RegSrv works as well).
I have monitored the application with ProcMon and it is obviously doing a late registration. It is as if the installer has advertised the contents of the merge module without installing them. I've also looked at the merge module, and my MSI, with Orca, but I can't work out any way of stopping this behavior.
I did wonder if it was anything to do with the versions of the MSMs, but it seems almost impossible to find out what the latest version of these Microsoft MSMs is, or to find anywhere to download them.
Obviously we do not want to make our customers go through this convoluted process when they install our product. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks Kiran. We also read that bit in the MSDN documentation. The problem is that we can't alter the Advertise attributes on items that are already built into Microsoft's Merge Modules (well, we could using Orca but it would be messy).
However, I think we may have found the source of the problem. The previous release of our product used a kit built using InstallShield. When we compared the .MSI created by InstallShield to the one created with Wix we noticed that the InstallExecuteSequence table of the IS one contains RegisterProgIdInfo, RegisterClassInfo and RegisterTypeLibraries, which do not appear in the Wix-generated MSI. We think some or all of these may be needed to force the MSMs to install. I need to find out how to put these into Wix, and then to try it to see if it works. I will try to remember to post the result here for posterity.
[Following day] Confirmed. For anyone else who has this problem, you just need to put a <RegisterClassInfo/> tag and a <RegisterProgIdInfo/> tag (and maybe a <RegisterClassLibraries/> tag, but I didn't need one of those) into your <InstallExecuteSequence>.
I am trying to do a custom action at the time of msi installation. But the dll required for my custom action is depends on other dlls. At the time of installtion it is giving the error like "a dll required for this install to complete could not run".How can I load the dependent dll files for this custom action to run properly.
The code that I am using is
<CustomAction Id='CheckingPID' BinaryKey='CheckPID' DllEntry='ValidateKey' />
<Binary Id ='CheckPID' SourceFile='$(sys.CURRENTDIR)\LicenseKeyClient_32d.dll'/>
<Binary Id ='CheckPID2' SourceFile='$(sys.CURRENTDIR)\curllib.dll'/>
<Binary Id ='CheckPID3' SourceFile='$(sys.CURRENTDIR)\libsasl.dll'/>
<Binary Id ='CheckPID4' SourceFile='$(sys.CURRENTDIR)\openldap.dll'/>
The files that you add in binary table usually get extracted with temporary names during the installation, so your DLL will not be able to locate the other DLLs you add next to it.
A workaround is to add those DLLs as normal files in the Temp system folder and delete them when the installation ends. This has the limitation that you need to set your custom action as deferred, so it executes after the files are installed, thus your DLLs get copied to Temp folder.
I don't know if wix has a support for temporary files, similar with the one present in Advanced Installer, but if not you could try to write a custom action to simulate it. Basically what Advanced Installer does is to extract those files in the Temp folder the moment the MSI is launched, and also deletes them when the installation is complete. This has the advantage that you can use the temporary files and in immediate custom actions, i.e. well before the files from your package are installed.
Despite Bogdan's excellent answer, allow me to add my 2 cents:
It looks like you are dealing with some form of license key validation? The best way is generally to deal with your license keys in the application itself, unless you want it written to HKLM instead of HKCU - in which case you might need the temporary admin rights generally acquired during installation.
You can also open a HKLM key for writing during setup, and write it from the application though this is generally frowned upon security-wise. This allows you to write a single license key for all users directly from the application.
The application features more flexibility and control of the process of registering your license key, and crucially an easy way to run the process again. From my perspective this is almost always needed for a serious application - often due to trial versions with the eventual need to register the license key at the end of the trial period from within the application itself - instead of uninstalling the application and reinstalling, or running the setup in repair / maintenance mode - which seems extremely clunky.
I have described this issue previously in some more detail: Reasons to deal with licensing in the application rather than the setup.
I'll also add that WiX DTF .NET custom actions really simplify this problem by allowing you to embed content into the self extracting custom action package and make them available in the current directory at runtime. Very easy.
But yes, Glytzhkof is correct. Any licensing / DRM done inside of an MSI is easily defeated. It's best to do this in the app or both. For example I've worked at companies where it's a share responsibility. You can enter one now or later. I've also worked at companies where the license key had bits embedded in it that drove feature selection. It gets complicated fast so try not to have to go down that road.
I have a request that I know many will shout about but I don't have any other way around it. In my WIX setup I have a dialog that uses the properties set in the setup to determine a product name(with version type etc) that ties in with our algorithm and a lock code that needs to be produced. Based on these the user enters their unlock key and the custom action pulls the details from all three text boxes to ensure it is correct. I did not write the algorithm for creating these and unfortunately can't change it.
My issue is that I need to be able to create a product key in the registry before this dialog so that my lock code algorithm can read from it. So basically I need my custom actions to be elevated. I read somewhere that someone implemented a custom action to call msiexec but now I cannot find it and don't know how to go about creating this. Has anyone ever had the same issues? I have been reading that people have but I can't seem to find their solution or even if there is one. Thanks in advance
Immediate custom actions CANNOT be elevated. Period, end of story. #FACT
What can you do?
1) Use a setup.exe bootstrapper that is manifested to require admin and a Launch Condition in the MSI that enforces it was launched by the bootstrapper. ( Bootstrapper passes a property to the MSI SETUPEXEDRIVEN=1 is what InstallShield calls it. ) This ensures that the entire UI sequence is elevated. (Not a best practice but I'm putting it out there for you.)
2) Write to HKCU instead of HKLM ( will likely require license code to be refactored but hey it was a broken design anyways. )
3) Refactor the installers interface to the license API. I've done this before. I once worked for a company that expected the installer to call an EXE to validate a license. One big problem is the EXE is out of process and cannot communicate back to the installer. So they started writing "ISVALID" to the registry and I was then expected to write a VBScript around the EXE to flush the value, call the exe and then check the value and set the MSI property. Ummmm can you say #FAIL? The optimal solution was to force the dev team to create an API for the license code that I could call directly from a standard MSI custom action that didn't require elevated permissions or any other hackery.
We are using Wix to build msi for our software. We have some components (plugins) to be implemented to the target machine. The plugins are different from one client to another. What we want to be able to do is to create a standard build and modify the feature list in the msi package. Is there a way to change the feature list dynamically from a custom action? (e.g. read the available plugins from a custom action and add some entries into the msi feature list accordingly)?
Any comments, advice, ideas are very much appreciated.
I've done a trick in the past where you build the MSI with external CABs ( 1 per feature ) and then use a custom action to verify that the CABs exist. If they don't exist you hide the feature. This way you can just build the installer once but then ship it to customers with different feature sets.
BTW, InstallAware has supports this story natively I believe.
The installer I'm writing using WiX 3.0 uses a RegistryValue element to modify an existing registry value (originally written by our main product). I'm trying to figure out a way to restore the registry value when the user uninstalls my utility. I'd like to avoid using a custom action, but that might be the only recourse? TIA.
I did this. The registry value in question was the application associated to a file extension, but it could be any registry value.
My first idea was to use a "custom action" for install and uninstall to preserve
and restore, respectively, the associated regy state. This
seemed simple enough.
I created a setup project in VS2008 and built the CA's as javascript files. The "on install" script grabbed the existing regy value and stashed it into a well-known place. The "on uninstall" script would look in the well-known place, and then put the value found there, back in the original location.
Easy, right?
There were two problems:
the script that ran during install, to preserve the pre-existing registry value,
runs AFTER the registry has already been updated
with the values for the newly installed thing. So it preserved the new setting instead of the setting that was there before the MSI ran. Not useful.
The script that runs during uninstall, runs AFTER the registry values, and in fact the entire directory subtree,
have been deleted. Including the stashed value. So it had lost its state.
To solve that I wrote another script that
re-orders the custom actions so they run at the proper times.
There's actually one more twist. Obviously, the "Restore" script (on
uninstall) won't work if it is run after the registry entries for the app have been deleted. I can't remember now, why... but I also determined that this script could not run before that. Somehow that wasn't working either.
So, I modified the MSI to run the restore script
twice. In phase 1, it transfers the stashed value to a "parking lot" in the registry.
Then the application's Keys and Values in the registry get deleted, but the parking lot remains. In
phase 2, outside the transactional protection, the restore script retrieves the state from the parking lot, restores
the file association, and then deletes the parking lot.
I can't remember exactly why I needed to do this in 2 steps, but I remember fighting with it for a while before coming up with that solution.
The way it works in development:
set the on install and on uninstall CA's in the VS project
build the VS Setup project
run the post-processing script that modifies the MSI.
When using the MSI, it's a little more complicated than I originally thought but it works.
If you are using WiX, you may have more control over the time and ordering of the steps, so may not need that post-processing step.
Finally, you said you wanted to avoid a CA. To me, CA's are avoided because they are painful to produce in C++, and producing them in .NET is often inappropriate. But, it's pretty simple to use Javascript for CA's. Some people think script is the wrong tool for the CA job. I think that's wrongheaded. I think script is a very good tool for this purpose. And once you can accept script as a good tool, then you don't need to hold your nose about creating a custom CA.
The registry table is incapable of writing a registry value during an uninstall so it is correct that this must be done via custom action. I am of the opinion that using script is bad. Whether you choose to listen is up to you. I can tell you that just the other day I was called into to trouble shoot a situation where some wrote a vbscript CA that was failing because the file system object had been unregistered as part of a security lockdown process.
I suggest C++ or C#/DTF depending on your needs.
Faced with similar issue, need to update the registry value on install and restore to previous value on uninstall.
Is the only solution possible is creating a custom action for this purpose?
I found a extension for wix that has fucntions for this purpose
link to wix extensions