1 reply to this topic

[tobalt]

Hi,

I already posted the same question in the Acresso community a couple of months ago but never got any response from Acresso itself. Guess that we still use InstallShield 10.5 does help that particularly ... anyway ...

We have a multi-instance InstallScript only project that works fine for a couple of years now. However, we now want to add the feature to copy/import settings from an older installation.

If we had the paths to all the previous instances that process should be trivial. Now my questions is how do we access the information about them?

When you start up the installer it lists all the previous instances in the very first screen (where you select new install or maintenance of an existing one).

So far I was unable to access this information with InstallScript in any way. Does anyone have an idea how to do that?

Going through the forums here and elsewhere I understand that I can't access any MSI specific functions from a 'pure' InstallScript installer.

Is there any other way to get this information? I am not even sure if I can get the ProductGUID or similar info - and even if I could: Could it help me to solve the problem by going through the Windows registry itself (the part where the uninstall information is stored for example)?

Thanks a lot for taking the time to read this!
T

[Stefan Krueger]

I haven't tried this but if you look at the default code for OnSetTARGETDIR() you'll see the pattern in which the destination folders for the instances are created. And the system variable MULTI_INSTANCE_COUNT tells you how many instances exist.

I the default code of OnCustomizeUninstInfo() you can see how the uninstall registry key is created using the IFX_MULTI_INSTANCE_SUFFIX. So you could also walk through the uninstall entries in the registry.

Note that I took this information from IS 2009, but I guess it was similar in earlier versions if they support multi-instance InstallScript setups.