2 replies to this topic

[sjimmerson]

We plan on generating an installation manifest that lists all of the features, components, files with date, time, version and size, registry entries and shortcuts to track changes to the installation and for use in a troublshooting tool Technical Support utilizes that compare the files, registry entries, etc. that are actually on the user's PC with the files, registry entries, etc. that are in the installation.

The issue that we have is that this manifest is generated after the installation is built, but we need to install the manifest to the end-user's PC.

One option we have is to build the installation twice. In this situation we would build the installation the first time, generate the manifest and copy it to a directory that would be included by a second build of the installation.

A second option is to add or update the file in the MSI database through automation. I have not attempted anything like this so I am not sure it can be done. Of course, if we are using a media type like the Network media type, we won't be able to access the MSI database since it is wrapped by the setup.exe bootstrapper.

Has anyone faced a similar situation? If yes, what was your solution?

Does anyone have any other suggestions or any additional information you could add to the options I mentioned?

One other note: I would like this to be a process that can be automated. I don't want to have to do something like open Orca to add this file.

Edited by sjimmerson, 28 January 2004 - 19:40.

[Stefan Krueger]

Why don't to generate the manifest before you build the install, from the source files? Note that Windows Installer doesn't keep a record of file dates in the .msi file, only version and size.

[sjimmerson]

Well, there are a couple of reasons why we did not want to do it before the build.

One is that the information that we want is already in the MSI database including things like registry entries, destination directories, features, components, shortcuts, etc. It was an oversight not realizing that the file date and time is not in the MSI.

Another reason is that file and registry information for merge modules is not available until the MSI is built, especially for third party merge modules.

I am always open for suggestions, but I don't understand how we could accomplish the same things as quickly and easily trying to generate the manifest before we build the MSI. In fact we are considering using the msi2xml utility to generate an XML manifest.

The following topic will give you a better idea of what we are trying to accomplish.

http://forum.install...=ST&f=31&t=9233