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UNC Path for installation


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Kurt Brecheisen

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Posted 27 October 2005 - 15:50

I would like to find a way to browse network locations for an installtion. I am using InstallShield 11. The Destination Dialog only allows me to use mapped drives for an installation location. I would prefer not to be forced to map a drive just for an installtion.

More Details:
My installation has two setup type options - Server and Client. Server mode installs all the server components on the pc it is running on and setups an SQL server database on the SQL server, which may or may not be the same pc as the application server. Everything works great here because I install the applications under the Program Files folder on the current pc and because the SQL Login dialog will provide all active SQL Server\instances on the network in the format of \\servername\instance.

Now the Client is where I have the issue. I need to point the client to both the SQL server and the Application Server. SQL is easy, using the same SQL login screen, I can get the server name and the instance. However, I have no way that I know of to find my application server if it is not on a mapped drive. I was trying to use a custom versions of the DestinationFolder and InstallChangeFolder dialogs for the Client install. I need to be able to write registry and INI entries to point the Client software to the Application server.

The only way I thought of to make this work was to be able to Browse to the network share for our application, as you can in Explorer. I could then do a couple of test to make sure the software is actually installed at that location and that the user has read/write rights to the software.

Does anybody know how to do this? Maybe there is a better approach that I haven't considered for reliably locating my software on a non-mapped drive. If so, I would like to know about it. I did call InstallShield for support on this issue and the rep I talked to had no solution for this. I was hoping maybe someone here might.
Kurt

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Stefan Krueger

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Posted 27 October 2005 - 16:26

I think that's a limitation of Windows Installer itself. So the only workaround probably is an external UI handler.

Kurt Brecheisen

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Posted 27 October 2005 - 16:57

Has anybody ever done this before and could provide examples?
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Zweitze

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Posted 27 October 2005 - 19:44

I think that the Windows Installer does not offer controls supporting UNC, because it cannot deal with UNCs in installs with elevated priviliges. Remember elevated installs are executed by a different, elevated account. This account may not have the same rights in remote folders. For some reason this is not a problem with mapped drives - I can only assume that credentials on drive mappings can be passed to elevated accounts.

One alternative is creating a Custom Action that calls the Win32 function BrowseForFolder(). Its dialog can have a "New Folder" button as well. But it behaves different: the folder is created immediatly, where the Windows Installer controls only create 'virtual folders', which are created when the install transaction is executed.
A less sophisticated alternative is creating a dialog with just an edit box where the user enters the destination folder, in that case put a SetTargetDir control event at the next button, this prevents going to the next dialog when the folder is not valid.