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[Aragorn26]

All right, so I have a bit of a problem with my installer organization/structure. I have a series of products built on the same underlying codebase. This application layer is very broad and the products built a top it quite distinct.

Creating one massive installer would require a very complicated single installer that practical no one would be able to use the same way. You would always have to do a custom. This approach is potentially very buggy and suboptimal. The user experience is awful the second they try to stray outside a couple of pre-selected norms. The maintenance is hellish.

My thought was to separate out this application layer so that its installation was encapsulated and distributed among the N installers for the separate applications. I see a number of solutions in installshield 10.5/11, but I'm not sure of the correct one.

I could create a Merge module for the common application layer. This works well, but it seems as though the application layer would have to be on disk N times, where N is the number of calling users. N distinct products at M megs a piece would create an awful lot of wasted disk space if either number grew large, which is the case.

I could nest the setups, but that's often a colossally bad idea, especially when you start to worry about advertisement etc.

I could create a setup prerequisite, but this would have the same problem as the merge module and be slightly uglier to the end user. Unless of course there is some option to redirect the location of this prerequisite on the disk. This should be possible, but I can't see it. If anyone has any thoughts on the matter, please let me know.

[Stefan Krueger]