2 replies to this topic

[bacchus]

I have an MSI project in VS2008 that have been working fine for about 2 years. I have since needed to upgrade a 3rd party api that has its own setupex.exe program. I currently install the setupex.exe to the target directory and use a custom action to run it. However, now that i'm upgrading the setupex.exe it needs to restart the computer and returns an error code of -17 saying it needs to restart. My MSI project thinks there was a major error and backs out the whole installation. How can i trap this reboot error from the setupex.exe program that my msi is running and make the msi ignore it or some other way to handle it. Thanks in advance!

[VBScab]

Change the Custom Action's attributes so that it ignores any exit code.

IIRC, VS has no MSI editing capability so you'll need to do that in Orca or, better, InstEdit. Find the Custom Action table, find the CA in the table and then edit the 'Type' column. Refer to this MSDN article for details of CA types and the 'Custom Action Return Processing Options' article linked on that page.

Remember, though, that the change means that ALL errors are ignored.

If it were me, I'd capture the set-up stub and create a proper MSI.

[bacchus]

Thanks for the reply. That should get me by for now. You said you would "capture the set-up stub and create a proper MSI". How do I achieve that? Do I need something better than VS setup and deployment project? Thanks.