Installing all children of parent feature from command line.

William Randlett

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Aug 17, 2006, 1:09:02 PM8/17/06

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Is there a way to install all the children of a parent feature from msiexec
command line? We want to do this for automated test purposes, ensuring that
all of the sub-features are set up correctly, and we want to test the
installation of the sub-features separately. So given the following structure:
Tools
- Tool A
- Tool B

I want to install Tools from the command line and get Tool A and Tool B, and
I also want to be able to install Tool A by itself from the command line.

Any help is appreciated.
William

James Drain

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Aug 17, 2006, 1:15:02 PM8/17/06

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Hi William,

You're after the ADDLOCAL property:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/msi/setup/addlocal.asp

Something like ADDLOCAL=ToolA

Hope this helps,
James
http://dotmsi.com

William Randlett

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Aug 17, 2006, 1:19:02 PM8/17/06

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James,

The ADDLOCAL property doesn't install all of the children of the feature, it
only installs the feature itself. So, if I say ADDLOCAL=Tools I get Tools but
I don't get Tool A or Tool B.

William

James Drain

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Aug 17, 2006, 1:51:01 PM8/17/06

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Hi William,

Did you get a chance to look at the link?

"The value of the ADDLOCAL property is a list of features that are delimited
by commas, and are to be installed locally"

ADDLOCAL=ToolA

Will install ToolA feature
and

ADDLOCAL=ToolB

Will install ToolB feature.

Hope that cleared it up!

dbareis [Windows Installer MVP]

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Aug 17, 2006, 6:07:04 PM8/17/06

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James Drain wrote:
> Hi William,
>

> Did you get a chance to look at the link?
> "The value of the ADDLOCAL property is a list of features that are delimited
> by commas, and are to be installed locally"

I think you'll find that what he says is what he literally wants, he
want to include all subfeatures of a particular feature. I'm not sure
this is possible, if not what you have said is a non-idea workaround
(list all of the individual features).

You could have all features installed (INSTALLLEVEL) and depending on
your needs that may work.

Bye,
Dennis

James Drain

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Aug 18, 2006, 9:52:02 AM8/18/06

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Humm so how about &Tools=3 as a condition of the subfeatures?

William Randlett

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Aug 21, 2006, 2:17:03 PM8/21/06

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Thanks for the responses. We doing some test-driven development on this setup
package and we were hoping to be able to ensure that both Tool A and Tool B
were included in the Tools feature. Using ADDLOCAL=ToolA,ToolB doesn't do
that, and using conditions doesn't really do it either. What we looking at
now is writing an app that lets you set a feature name and then looks at the
Features table to determine all the subfeatures. The app would construct the
ADDLOCAL value based on the values in the table.

Gerry Hickman

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Aug 22, 2006, 4:59:39 PM8/22/06

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Hi,

I'm confused about this because I thought it installed child features by
default anyway? Surely it would defeat the whole concept of "child"
features if they were not automatically installed with the parent?

--
Gerry Hickman (London UK)

William Randlett

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Aug 22, 2006, 5:57:01 PM8/22/06

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Yes, you would think that. But after you read the documentation and try it
out, you see that it doesn't work the same way as the GUI. In fact, there
doesn't seem to be a way to emulate the GUI from the command line.

Gerry Hickman

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Sep 21, 2006, 3:49:55 PM9/21/06

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Hi William,

I don't know if you're still reading this as it was a while ago, but
what you say here causes me great concern! Are you saying TreeView
installers based on MSI technology such as Microsoft Office 2003 are
enumerating and passing lists of all child features when you choose a
top-level feature in the UI?

If I install the Excel feature from the command line, are you saying it
will FAIL to install the sub-features such as converters and filters?