I am a first time user of this group and so pardon me for any mistakes and unclear statements.
What I am trying to do is to create single setup.exe (not msi) using installshield. But when I build the project what I get is other files along with the .exe file for e.g. .cab, .hdr, .inx and other such files.
I am using the options under Release -> Release Wizard -> General options-> Checked the "Create a single file executable" & "Compress compiled script" options but still I get the extra files along with the setup.exe file. I want a setup.exe file to be created independent of the other local files.
So could anyone suggest me how to achieve that.
Any help will be appriciated.
Thanks.
As Michael Urman wrote, you will find the one file in adjacent folder.
The folder name is "Package".
Those files are always created for InstallScript projects. When you build a single file executable, the single file version that packages it all together is available in an adjacent folder.
Related
I have a Visual C++ for Linux project in VS2017 that I'm building on a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian. This project consists of a single source file (main.c) and an image (test.jpg). When building the project, I want the image file to also be deployed to the pi, so that the code in main.c can do something with it locally. However, I can't figure out how to do this
The image file's Content property is set to True, as is Included in Project. In the project properties, under Copy Sources, Sources to Copy is set to "#(SourcesToCopyRemotely)" and Copy Sources is set to "Yes". However, when I build, only main.c is copied to the Pi, and the compiler output is just a single .out file. I hoped to also see test.jpg there, but alas.
This article mentions that #(SourcesToCopyRemotely) defaults to all files in the project. However, when I evaluate the value of #(SourcesToCopyRemotely, it evaluates to just "main.c".
How do I make sure content files in my projects also end up in the build directory, along with the .out file? Preferably without having to manually enter each filename in a post-build step.
It turns out this is a bug in VC++ for Linux. A workaround, currently, is to use Additional Sources to copy. There's a caveat though: it doesn't work with remote paths that start with ~. So you can't use $(RemoteRootDir) if the Remote Build Root Directory setting is set to the default of "~/projects".
I've currently got Remote Build Root Directory set to "/home/pi/projects" and for each file I want to copy to the build directory I set Additional Sources to Copy to "[filename]:=$(RemoteRootDir)/$(ProjectName)/bin/$(Platform)/$Configuration)/[filename]". For instance:
firstimage.png:=$(RemoteRootDir)/$(ProjectName)/bin/$(Platform)/$(Configuration)/firstimage.png;secondimage.png:=$(RemoteRootDir)/$(ProjectName)/bin/$(Platform)/$(Configuration)/secondimage.png
Right-clicking on the non-source code file to open it's properties page and flagging as Content in the General tab will cause the file to be copied to the remote. There is no need to add anything to the Copy Sources tab. The Copy Sources page of the project properties must show the default of #(SourcesToCopyRemotely). And when you edit this setting the macro should show an expansion with the additional files included.
I have found that it necessary to refresh the macro by clearing Source to Copy and then restoring it to the default after you have marked the additional files as content.
I have encountered problems when the additional files are not in the same folder as the C++ source files on the Windows host and/or you want to put them somewhere else on the remote. There are several open issues on the VCLinux GitHub site like this one so it will be worth reporting any problems you have on there.
[VCLinux 1.0.6 on VS Pro 2017 + Debian Jessie remote]
The "Pre-Build Event" section of the project properties offers "Additional Files To Copy". Addressing my file there (relative to the solution) showed following in the output when building:
Copying file 'C:\myfilepath\resource.png' to '/home/pi/projects/myproject/resource.png'
It is possible to move the files to the final destination then with Remote Post-Build Events (mv source destination). Not the most elegant way, but the first thing I got working..
we actually build an InstallShield project for our application with the functionality to include files dynamic into a component. All files will be taken which are in a specific place.
Because of problems, which are not part of this question, we want to change this to components where we add files explicit to custom separated components.
The question is, is there a best practice for this? We have the small fear that we easily can forget to add files to the component we new created. These can be dll files, .config files, pdfs or just xml.
(We build the installer every night using TFS.)
We found a solution for the problem.
What we wanted to solve:
During the build we want to be informed if files got removed
During the build we want to be informed if new files are missing
we solved this by two more or less easy things.
1. Information if a file is removed
This is easy sone, we have all files added explicitly, each single file is an own component now, if one file is missing the whole project does not build with the exact error message.
2. Information for missing files
For this we wrote a small tool which runs by a prebuild event of the installshield project.
There it opens the *.ism file as an xml file and searches for the "Files" table.
Than it takes all files from the drop folder and looks if all files are in there.
If there are files missing but we don't expect them, like pdb files or test dlls, we have an additional text file we just called "IgnoreList".
The tool skips these files by the check.
Now we are on a very good state to get informed directly on the next morning if the project was able to build or not, and if not what happened, so we can be sure that in the final target application are files are there :-)
I have a library which includes samples of how to use the library along with unit tests.
I'm trying to create custom VS2012 solutions that will be in the deployment.
Depending on input given when initiating the deployment, I want to be able to create a solution - e.g. Samples.sln - which includes projects specified in the input file.
Example:
//inputfile1.txt
ProjectA
ProjectB
I run an MSBuild xml file or an F# script (or anything that can do this) and I get a Samples directory with a Samples.sln containing ProjectA, ProjectA.Tests, ProjectB, ProjectB.Tests
A similar thing would happen if I gave an input file with ProjectX & Project7... etc.
With MSBuild, I've figured out how to read the file input, copy project folders to a new folder, and do some other things I would need for this whole process but I can't figure out how to create and customize a solution. I'm not sure this is even possible with MSBuild - I think I can only alter an already existing solution (but I've had trouble doing this as well).
I figure I have these options:
A. Add all projects to a Samples solution, then use msbuild to turn them on or off
or
B. There exists some other way (not using msbuild) to do this whole process
Is msbuild even capable of A?
You should understand that MsBuild mainly is a build platform. It also happens to be able to read and write file etc but that's not it's core business. So while you can generate solution files for it, it's going to be pretty hard using just MsBuild as it's simply not meant to be able to do things like that directly.
Here's an option C: if you open an sln in the text editor you'll see the structure is quite straigtforward: for every project there's a Project ... EndProject. You could generate these strings in the proper format (that is, genareate guid, figure out relative path to solution, get project name from path, ...) in an MsBuild target, put all of them in an ItemGroup then write it to a solution files using WriteLinesToFile. Perfectly possible, but a lot of work and I wouldn't recommend it.
For your option A, that's even harder: to include/exclude projects from a build, VisualStudio uses the .suo files and those are in some binary proprietary format which I have no idea how to generate.
That leaves you with option B which is basically option C but without reinventing the wheel: find a tool that can generate solution files for selected projets and have MsBuild invoke it useing Exec. There are probably a bunch of tools that can do this, but here's an example using the first usable one I found on the internet called SolutionMaker. Suppose your projects are in directory Foo, you'd use it like this:
<Exec Command="SolutionMaker /s Foo/foo.sln /p Foo /v 2012"/>
since the corresponding command line options are
/s <solution>: Solution file path
/p <path>: project root path
/v <fileVersion>: New solution file will be generated in the specified format.
valid versions: 2008, 2010, 2012.
I am using installshield 11 to create Basic MSI Project. My requirment is, when i unstall the project, i want to preserve certain files.( I don't want these Certain files to be removed when unstallation takes place ). Morover, these files are not a part of the component, but they are created(copied) during installation process by using copyfile (script) command from specific location.
-Dev
Use Disable(LOGGING)....Enable(LOGGING). Using CopyFile() in-between these methods will prevent uninstall removing the files
Windows installer removes only those files and folders which it installs. That is each file present in it's database in File table and Folder table. It do not remove any file which does not have entry in File table, similar for folder.
Also, If folder is not empty then that folder does not get deleted during uninstall.
If your installing some files using Copyfile script ( may be using any custom action) then those files will not be removed during uninstall.
Thanks Balachandra for your response, But i have below observation which might help.
Files which i want to preserve is created by CopyFile, and target dir which i mention in the copyfile command does not exist. So CopyFile creates the folder and copy the file to that folder. So obviosly we will not have this folder entry in the dir table of installsheild
But this approach does not help, uninstallation is removing all copied files from this folder.
-Dev
Thanks, Alerter, I've been fighting this one for 2 days.
We install an example configuration file and create a copy of it (on first installation). We needed to preserve the configuration file if the customer changed it, but the file was always getting deleted on uninstall. Disabling the LOGGING around the CopyFile command was exactly the solution for this situation.
Dev, I know this is an old post, but you should accept this as the correct answer.
Hopefully this phrase will help others find this solution easier through the search engines: Installshield file created with CopyFile is always deleted during uninstall
I seem to have received the privilege of picking up some install shield projects. I've used install anywhere in the past and I was wondering if there was an equivalent of speedfolder in installshield. A speedfolder is a way of blindly copying an entire folder into the project without explicitly selecting each file.
There are a couple of ways you can do this.
Dynamic File Linking or using the Files and Folders view.
With Dynamic File linking you can point your project to a directory or directories and IS will refresh the list of files at build time and add them to your install.
The files and folder view can be used to drag and drop a whole load of files and folders in to your project in one go.
If you choose to use Dynamic File Linking be sure to read up on the implications first. Check out the Installshield help file