I’ve been using WiX for a few years. I have a question that’s about installation but not strictly about WiX. But this is the only forum I know dealing with installation on Windows. If this is out of place please feel free to redirect me elsewhere, I’d appreciate it.
My company currently has Product A with an installer that installs Application A. We also have a Product B which installs a Device Driver B consisting of a few DLLs. These are already released and available for download. Now I am being asked to make an installer for new Product C. The installer must be a single file that is downloaded from a web page and then executed. It must include Application A, Device Driver B, and a new Application C. The old Product A and Product B will still exist separately though. Product C does not replace them. A quick and dirty way: I could create a separate installer for just Application C, then put all three installers for A, B and C in a self-extracting Zip file so that they get run one at a time. But that is not atomic, ugly for the end user, and it’s bad for upgrades. What if only one of the three get upgraded? The other two installers will get launched anyway and prompt the user for repair or removal. Not only that, what if the user sees an upgrade for the separate Product A on our website and install that? So my best solution so far is to create a single installer for Product C that that includes all three of Application A, Driver for Device B, and Application C. But I need to forbid users from installing Product A or B since I cannot have two of Application A or Device Driver B on the same computer. So I was thinking I need to consider Product A’s Application A and Product C’s Application A as two separate things with different component GUIDs, even though they are really the same application. The same goes for the Device Driver component. One thing I’d like to know is whether the following makes sense. Could I give Application A the same component GUIDs in both Product A and Product C installers? Then if a user tried to install Product A after Product C was already installed (or an upgrade to Application A via a Product A installer) would it not harm anything? It would just be like one Application A on the system. Then could I still apply Product C upgrades later without trouble? (I can already imagine problems though with the Start Menu shortcuts if they install it to a different location on disk, by default.) I really need a multi-level install, but I know Windows Installer doesn’t work that way. Are there any better ways to handle this? Sheesh, managers don’t realize what trouble they cause when they hand you these kind of requirements. Thanks, Jim ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_sfd2d_oct _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
