5 replies to this topic

[MonkeyK]

My team has recently recieved a lot of negative feed back from our users because files did not get updated during the install.

Our uses have asked that we come up with a way to prove that the install did what we expected. I would like to add a post install diagnostic to my install. Something like compare dates of important files and make sure that they are current.

Ideally this could be done by extracting the date information from the source when I build the release. Is there a way to do this in Installshield?

Thanks,
Mike

[Stefan Krueger]

There's no built in method but you could run it as a custom action. Another option might be to generate a log of the update to see why it fails.

[MonkeyK]

My first suggestion was to log all installs. While we think we know why the files were not updated (unversioned DLLs being treated as user data by the install), a log would help in case we are not right. Unfortunately, logging was rejected by a group that represents our users.

My next thought was to run a check of expected vs resultant critical files to determine if the install acted properly. If the check fails, either the install aborts or the user get an ominous message. This was accepted

I think that I know how to compare the values. I just don't know how to get the source values to compare. My initial thought was to try and extract source values at build time and build them into a table.

Lately I've been thinking that I already have the source built into the install, so I just need to be able to find source file attributes (like modified date) to compare against existing values on the machine. Any idea how I can get the source file attributes?


Thanks,
Mike

[Stefan Krueger]

The MSI file only includes version number and size of the file, not the date. So you would have to open the CAB file (if your application files are compressed into CABs) or look at the CD (for uncompressed files) to get the date.

[MonkeyK]

Can I open the CAB file and look at dates using installscript? If not, is there a way to run some sort of macro at build time to extract the information?

[Stefan Krueger]

I think you would have to call some WinAPI.