4 replies to this topic

[goober]

When my MSI is running with the basic user interface level, there aren't any status messages above the progress bar.

In following MSDN's page on the ActionText table I populated the ActionText table with ...

Action--Description--Template
===================
Rollback--Undoes actions.--[1]
RollbackCleanup--Removes old files.--[1]
GenerateScript--Generates system operations for action.--[1]

... and I also added more rows where the first column contains the name of an Action from InstallExecuteSequence that lies between the InstallInitialize and InstallFinalize actions, the second column contains some descriptive text, and the third column contains something like [1] or blah: [1]

In fact, I have a row for every one of the Actions that are sequenced between InstallInitialize and InstallFinalize.

• How do I get these entries in ActionText to show as status messages near the progress bar in basic UI mode?
• What does the number 1 refer to in the Template?

Thanks in advance for your help. I feel like I'm missing something very basic even though I've been reading the documentation.

[Stefan Krueger]

Maybe the built in progress dialog (which is used in Basic UI mode) doesn't have a text control for that purpose.

[goober]

I do not see any status text in full UI mode either...

[Zweitze]

I don't think that basic UI shows action messages - I never saw it report the files being copied etc.
But in full UI you can add controls that subscribe to the ActionData and ActionText events. The control with the ActionText event displays the value from the Description column. The control with the ActionData event works more complicated: Every time that the custom action calls MsiProcessMessage, the value of the Template column is used as a template for the record, the whole lot is parsed by MsiFormatRecord, and the result is displayed in the control.

[goober]

Thank you for your help!

After some more poking around, I found that I can change values in the Dialog and Control tables to get Reduced UI Mode to look as much like Basic UI Mode as I want, and this gives me the ability to display some text if I want to.

Of course, I suppose these changes affect the ProgressForm which is shared by other UI modes... so I would have to make sure the other modes still look acceptable, at least the ones my users might see.