The EXE setup file

Advanced Installer comes with a Setup program which can be used as a bootstrapper. This is useful if you want to create an EXE installation package or if your package has some prerequisites.

If you build your EXE setup with the installation files outside (MSI, CAB etc.), the bootstrapper will use an INI file to store it's settings. It can also receive command line options.

The Advanced Installer bootstrapper can be set as Unicode or as non-Unicode. If the Windows 9x predefined launch condition is unchecked, the bootstrapper used by the package will be Unicode. However, if this launch condition is checked, the bootstrapper will not be Unicode. This specific predefined launch condition is used because older versions of the Windows OS do not support Unicode.

Standard command line switches

You can use all of the command line options that MSIEXEC accepts (basically all the command line parameters you can use for a MSI package). The command line received by the EXE bootstrapper will be passed to MSIEXEC when launching the main MSI. This command line overrides the one specified in the "Install Options" from the Bootstrapper Page. If you need to specify the package location in the supplied command line, then you can use the // marker and the setup will replace this parameter with the actual path to the MSI package. If this marker is not specified in the command line, the setup will insert "/i path_to_msi" in the command line, which will automatically perform an installation. Example of valid command line options include:

"/q", "/log", "/a //", "/x // /log", etc.

When setting the value of a property in the command line of the bootstrapper, the sequence // is not supported. If you want to pass this sequence to the installation package (for example an URL which starts with "http://"), you can add the | character in front of the "//" characters. This way, you will have something like this: "http:|//".

Proprietary command line switches

/extract <path>

Extracts the MSI contained by the EXE to the specified location. If the path contains spaces you must enclose it in quotes:

Example

Mypackage.exe /extract:"C:\My work"

This command will extract the Mypackage.msi file in the "My work" folder.

/? and /help

Both these commands will display a help dialog containing the command line options for the EXE setup.

/exenoui

Launches the EXE setup without UI.

/exebasicui

Launches the EXE setup with basic UI.

The UI level set using the above command line options will overwrite the default UI level specified when the package was built.

/listlangs

Lists the languages supported by the EXE setup.

/exelang <langId>

Launches the EXE setup using the specified language. This command line option will have effect only if the EXE setup was build with the language selection dialog

You can use both an UI level and /exelang command line options at the same time.

These commands affect only the language selection dialog and the dialogs in the prerequisite wizard. In order to also affect the MSI package please use the standard MSIEXEC command line parameters. Note that the MSI parameters must come after the boostrapper parameters.

Return code

The EXE bootstrapper will return -1 if the user presses the "Cancel" button, while installing the prerequisites. Otherwise it will return the code returned by MSIExec.exe after running the main MSI.

The Setup EXE provides the MSI it launches with the SETUPEXEDIR property which contains the folder path from where it was executed.