xen2
Posts: 3
Joined: Thu Oct 20, 2016 5:38 pm

Better UAC for prerequisites

Thu Oct 20, 2016 5:49 pm

Hello,

We have a bunch of 8~10 prerequisites (in the first part of our .exe installer). All of them need UAC admin privileges to install.
What's annoying is that each of those prerequisites separately ask for UAC elevation, leading to lot of flow-interrupting/invasive user interaction (that's even worst considering most of those msi/exe prerequisites are installed in silent mode and are quite fast).

Would it be possible to do something like:
- Installer runs, and check if prerequisites step is needed
- If at least one, installer gets UAC (by running itself again as Admin? or running a separate embedded .exe?) -- that way, all prerequisites install smoothly with limited user interaction -- UAC is only happening once
- If not, just keeps going to the main installation (which usually don't need UAC, at least in our case) -- this is the best situation, no UAC at all

That way, instead of 8~10 UAC request, it happens only once if necessary, or not at all in best case (ideal).

Thanks and keep up the great work!

Daniel
Posts: 8237
Joined: Mon Apr 02, 2012 1:11 pm
Contact:  Website

Re: Better UAC for prerequisites

Fri Oct 21, 2016 12:43 pm

Hello,

In order to grant only once access in UAC dialog for all the prerequisites added to your project, you can set the "Run as administrator" check box in "Install Parameters" page of your main project. This option is supported only for the EXE installer type.

All the best,
Daniel
Daniel Radu - Advanced Installer Team
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xen2
Posts: 3
Joined: Thu Oct 20, 2016 5:38 pm

Re: Better UAC for prerequisites

Sat Oct 22, 2016 3:24 am

Thanks for your answer.
However, this is not exactly the behavior we would like.

We are using it as a prerequisites installer that run silently on each OTA update of our app.
If all prerequisites are already there, we'd rather not have the UAC popup at all.

Note: if there was a way to call the installer without running Admin and returns us a boolean saying if action is necessary (i.e. re-run the installer in admin mode), it would also be fine.

Of course, we could also do the prerequisites check in our updater to know if we need to run that prerequisite installer, but that would be a lot of registry check duplication, difficult to keep in sync and error-prone.

Daniel
Posts: 8237
Joined: Mon Apr 02, 2012 1:11 pm
Contact:  Website

Re: Better UAC for prerequisites

Thu Oct 27, 2016 8:58 am

You're welcome.

Unfortunately, we do not have predefined options for your specific requirements. I forwarded your scenario to our development team and maybe they will consider an option to launch the prerequisite packages under a single elevated process. Thank you for your suggestion.

Until then the only workaround I can think of will be to add all of your prerequisites under an EXE wrapper setup configured to run as administrator. Then you can add the EXE wrapper setup as a prerequisite to your main setup project and use for its install conditions the reunion of each one of your prerequisite install conditions. Also , you should check the "Install only if at least one condition is false" option for your EXE wrapper prerequisite.

Let us know if this helped.

All the best,
Daniel
Daniel Radu - Advanced Installer Team
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