In my installation I have a set of features that must be installed mutually exclusive on the target system.
Being a good practice (and after an inquiry perhaps being one of the few reasonable alternatives) in this case I have authored a new dialog which uses RadioButtons to ensure exclusiveness at the UI level. Then the features can be mutually selected with AddLocal and Remove ControlEvents of a PushButton.
But how can mutual exclusiveness be guaranteed if the Installer does not run at full UI level and the dialog will not be shown?
How do I ensure an initial selection of certain features based on a property? (as I have understood standard/custom actions to do this are not available and that e.g. MsiUseFeature functions are not allowed...)
To complicate matters further, the underlying components use identical file names (that's also a reason why they must be mutual exclusive) and I don't know how this does interfere with windows installer. I want that maintainance and repair installations work properly...
(If the feature selection state is based on a local property, would I have to save the property then? (so that repair and maintainance installations will work properly either in full UI mode or not?))
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Before using features in my BASIC-MSI-project, I have had only components that had to be installed mutually exclusive. To accomplish this I used mutually exclusive conditions, which was a very robust and secure installation, as never two components could get installed. I easily initialized the component-conditions by initializing a property with a custom action. However the drawbacks - which also seem to be well known with msi projects - were that these component-conditions were evaluated once at "CostFinalize" and then gave static results, e.g. in an SelectionTree (Installshield: in CustomSetup dialog) and wishing to modify the installation in a maintainance installation, one had to mark the components as transitive.Another very nice thing was that with this approach I could use two orthogonal parameters, i.e. I could use feature-states and then the component-conditions to select of the remaining features/components, which I think (?) is not possible when only using features and subfeatures. e.g. for a language selection task for 2 features A and B one would have to include the subfeatures A_english and B_english, compared to the 2 independent selections feature A and condition "english"...]
Thank you very much in advance!
