Importing an Existing MSI

This tutorial will guide you in importing a MSI into an Advanced Installer project.

Lets suppose you have an older MSI file built with another tool and you want to create the same MSI with Advanced Installer. Creating the project from scratch is a time consuming operation and requires extensive knowledge about the original MSI. By using the Advanced Installer support for importing MSI files you can do this in notime.

The import process may not add all the resources of the original MSI. So after importing you should inspect the resulted project to make sure that everything is ok.

Importing MSI packages with validation errors may fail.

As an example we shall import the 64-bit version of the 7-zip File Manager.

1. Starting a "MSI Import" project
2. Collect Information
3. Select Installation Folder
4. Import MSI

Starting a "MSI Import" project

If Advanced Installer is not currently running, launch it by double-clicking a desktop icon or selecting it from the "Start" menu. When the application starts, you will see a dialog where you can choose "Import MSI" project type.

The Import MSI Wizard will be launched assisting you to configure the import parameters.

Collect Information

In this dialog select the location of the MSI that you want to import and specify a work directory where the MSI resources will be extracted.

Select Installation Folder

Specify the installation folder. Advanced Installer will automatically detect it and it will be marked italic in the folder tree. To change the installation folder use the "Set Installation Folder" context menu option. The new installation folder will appear bold.

System directories cannot be set as installation folder.

Import MSI

Press [ Finish ] button to import the MSI into a new Advanced Installer project.