Installer for product that includes other products with their own installers
Øystein Reigem
I have InstallShield Professional (or Bilingual West, to be exact).
I want to make an installer for a product that includes other products.
The other products have their own installers. Those installers might not
be developed in InstallShield, and I have to take them as they are. I
would like to come as close as possible to having one installer for
everything. Can I make an installer that runs the other installers? Can
somebody give me some general advice? I'd appreciate any input on this.
Some details:
My product contains text documents with scanned images, a program to
view the text and a program to view the images. In addition there are
some other files (fonts and a utility program).
The two viewer programs are commercial products and come with their own
installers.
The text viewer is FolioViews. (To be fair it is much more than a
viewer.) The installer for FolioViews also installs the text and image
files. I generate this installer with a special FolioViews utility,
telling which text and image files I want installed.
The image viewer is InfoView.
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******************************************************************
Oystein Reigem, Humanistisk datasenter (Norwegian Computing Centre
for the Humanities), Harald Haarfagresgt 31, N-5007 Bergen, Norway
Tel: +47 55 58 29 54 Tel direct Oystein: +47 55 58 32 42
Fax: +47 55 58 94 70 E-mail: oystein...@hd.uib.no
Garrett Colson
Sounds like you want to scan the users system, if they don't have Folio
installed, then LaunchAppAndWait the Folio setup you are supplying? Or just
LaunchApp if user selects a vewer in Component Selection dialog? Meybe you
could make viewer required if user elects to install images? There are many
ways to approach design. You might want to try some quick prototypes to see
which approach is more useable for your situation.
-gary (Powersoft RE)
Øystein Reigem
Garrett,
Thank you very much. Having almost no experience with this
I really appreciate your response.
And maybe I should get my hands dirty now instead of asking
more questions, but I cannot help myself...
When I install programs their setups often recommend me to
close all other applications. It would be interesting to
know all the reasons, but I assume that one of them is that
setups work with files that are critical to many
applications, e.g DLLs, so things can go wrong if other
apps simultaneously use those files. But cannot conflicts
arise also when one setup runs another?
> Sounds like you want to scan the users system, if they
> don't have Folio installed,
Hmm. I have to consult my colleague about this. He's the
one who's prepared the Folio infobase, and he knows more
about Folio. (I think I presented this as *my* project,
but we are several collaborating persons and institutions.)
But as far as I know we distribute our Folio and the
infobase together (I think the word is "bound"). So even if
the user already's got (a different) Folio on his system we
have to install ours. But I haven't thought about possible
conflicts between different versions of Folio.
> then LaunchAppAndWait the Folio setup you are supplying?
Yes, it sounds reasonable to me to let the main setup
launch each of the other setups in sequence, wait for each
of them to finish, and also try to find out if things went
well to see if there is a point in continuing with the
next one.
> Or just LaunchApp if user selects a vewer in Component
> Selection dialog? Meybe you could make viewer required
> if user elects to install images?
I think all our components are required. The images are on
CD-ROM(s) anyway.
> There are many ways to approach design. You might want to
> try some quick prototypes to see which approach is more
> useable for your situation.
Right. Get my hands dirty... :-)
- Oystein -
--
Oystein Reigem, Humanities Information Technologies (HIT),
Harald Haarfagresgt 31, N-5007 Bergen, Norway
Tel: +47 55 58 29 54 Tel direct Oystein: +47 55 58 32 42
Fax: +47 55 58 94 70 E-mail: oystein...@hit.uib.no