The Feature Properties

General

Identifier

This is the key used to identify a specific feature. It is used in conditions to refer to the installed state or the action state of a feature, or in some Windows Installer Properties like ADDLOCAL, ADDSOURCE, REINSTALL, REMOVE etc.

When changing a feature's identifier, all the conditions and properties that refer to this identifier must be updated accordingly.

Description

A longer description of the feature. This text will appear in the Customize Dialog when the feature is selected in the features tree. You can localize this value.

Feature Tree

There are three options for the initial display of a feature:

• Not Displayed - the feature will not be displayed to the user in any dialog
• Display Collapsed - the feature will be displayed collapsed in the features tree from the Customize dialog
• Display Expanded - the feature will be displayed expanded in the features tree.

The state of "collapsed" or "expanded" makes sense only if the feature has subfeatures.

Installation behavior

Every feature has an attached integer called its Install Level. This install level is compared with the user-selected application install level and it dictates if the feature should be installed or not. There are three well known install levels values: 0 (Disabled), 1 (Typical) and 4 (Complete).

You can select one of the following install behavior for the feature base on a correspondent install level:

• Installed by default (Install Level 1 - Typical).
  The feature will be installed by default, on a Typical installation. The user can choose to disable it from "CustomizeDlg" when performing a custom installation.
• Not installed by default (Install Level 4 - Complete).
  The feature will not be installed on a Typical installation. The user can choose to install it from "CustomizeDlg" when performing a custom installation or by selecting complete in "SetupTypeDlg".
• Disabled (Install Level 0 - Disabled).
  The feature will be disabled. The user has no possibility to change it's installation state. It will not be displayed during the installation.
• Install the feature only if "INSTALLLEVEL" property is greater than
  This option gives you the possibility to specify your own install level. A feature is installed only if it's install level is less than or equal to the current INSTALLLEVEL property value. The installation level for any installation is specified by the INSTALLLEVEL property, and can be an integral from 1 to 32,767.

You can set the install level based on a condition in the Conditional Levels Dialog. Use the [ Conditional install level ] link to edit conditional install levels.

Install Settings

• Install feature locally
  The feature and all it's resources will be copied on the target computer.
• Run feature from installation source
  The components of this feature that are not marked for local installation will be installed to run from source. This is the default behaviour, which the user can change from the Customize dialog.
• Use parent feature installation settings
  The state of the feature is the same as the state of the parent feature. This option is available only if the feature has a parent.
• Always install the feature
  The User Interface of Windows Installer does not display an option to change the state of the feature. The "Entire feature will be unavailable" option will not be available for this feature in "CustomizeDlg."

Advertise Settings

Allow advertise

This feature can be installed as advertised but this is not the default installation option.

• The default installation state is advertised.
  The feature will be installed by default as advertised.
• Disable advertise if the target system doesn't support it
  Advertising for this feature is disabled if the shell does not support the Windows Installer descriptors.

Disable advertise

The feature is not allowed to be advertised.

Builds

In case you have defined more that one build in the Media page, you can chose to remove the feature from some builds. If a feature is removed from a build, all other resources that demand that feature (components, component members, class entries, type libraries...) will also be removed from the build.

Include feature in all builds

Use this option if the feature should be present in all your builds.

Include feature only in the selected builds

This option allows you to specify the exact builds that will contain the feature. You can select those builds in the list below.