Hi,

We have to distribute a new piece of software which comes as 4 seperate setups (base, SP, hotfix, custom forms). All these setups are made with installshield. Is there an easy way to combine these 4 into 1 setup ?

The way I did it was to write a small application that performed as a carousel. However, that was under contract so I couldn't let you have the source.

How about writing a bit of HTML to allow the user to choose? Or do they have to chain each other?

Have you checked out http://www.wise.com ?
They do various products that let you tailor any MSI/Wise based installation.

If it were me doing it (you're describing a major component of my primary day job here), I would extract and reverse-engineer all four installs, and create from scratch a single unified install that did the entire thing from one clean setup program.

If you are not good at that sort of thing, it gets more tricky. Rob's suggestion of a round-robin control program could work, but only if the installs in question don't need to do reboots as part of their installations.

Note that just because the installs don't reboot your one particular test machine, that doesn't mean they might not reboot someone else's machine. The reboot thing might be needed on some system configurations and not on others.

Tony, what tool/s do you use to do that?

Reverse-engineering: InControl from PC magazine.

Creating installs from scratch: InstallShield 5.1.

That sounds like something I'd WinBatch.

windows server comes with an .msi creation program on the CD. basically, you run it, run all you need to install, and then stop it. it makes note of all the changes (you have to edit out what is relevant or not). works hella well, and i think thats what you need.

Knowing the amount of hand-tweaking and work it takes to figure an installer's behavior (as well as its complex behavior relating to varying target systems), I'd trust such a tool about as far as I could throw it.

its pretty simple really. it i forgot to mention that it only tracks the processes that you launch w/ it... so you wont be getting background interference from services or what not.

and the fact that it is an msi file gives you the option to use w2k server's deployment feature.

Well I did...sort of.

Created setup response files by running setup -r 4 times
compiled (bat2exe) a batch file that does a setup -s in the right sequence and stuffed all this in a sfx winzip and it works like a charm.

The only downside to this approach is that the "package" is now around 40Mb whereas a neatly packaged version should be around 14Mb. I'll try the other suggested options (MSI & Wise/installshield) next week when all is quiet again.

Thank you all for the suggestions

http://www.tlsecurity.net/windows/reversal/ has some stuff that looks like it might be useful for reverse engineering InstallShield stuff.

Actually at work I use Novell Zenworks, having directory enabled application rollout beats the hell out of policies and login scripts.
It handles the everything, package dependencies, editable installs, scheduling, workstation imaging, remote control, inventory etc etc. The new one (V4) even works with web apps and terminal server users.
Great package.
You don't actually need to have a Netware server nowadays either.

Dude. Suh-wheet link.

/me grabs the decompressor and decompiler.

Yeah, I was casting around looking for something that could dump the contents of InstallShield EXE distributables (I'm trying to do a clean install of XP Pro on my new Sony Vaio, without the preinstalled stuff, but I'm having trouble finding all of the drivers I need), and stumbled across that.

I would advise to take a look here for some more up to date stuff.

Cool. I managed to solve my problem (found the files I needed on another CD), but maybe this stuff will be useful to Tony.

Thank you for that link, excellent.