ISWIX, LLC View Christopher Painter's profile on LinkedIn profile for Christopher Painter at Stack Overflow, Q&A for professional and enthusiast programmers

August 17, 2006

CustomActionData for InstallScript 12 Only

lysemoose recently mentioned on InstallShield Community that he was trying to prepare for an upgrade to InstallShield 12 by refactoring his InstallScript custom actions to properly use the CustomActionData pattern.

The techniques described for use with InstallShield 12 are not compatible with previous versions of InstallShield. This is because previous versions use a DCOM/ROT singleton object to access the MSI handle from the client side msiexec not the server side msiexec that the custom action is running in.

For an example, populate the Property table with CustomActionData = Hello and try accessing it from an InstallScript deffered CA. You will see in your logfile the server side passing the CustomActionData to the custom action, but then you will see the original data from the property table appear in your MsiGetProperty.

If you replace the InstallScript with VBScript you will see the correct data since session.property uses the correct MSI handle.

This is why InstallShield 12 is such a big deal in getting InstallScript to be truely MSI compliant.

No comments: