brian
Posts: 39
Joined: Tue Nov 29, 2005 5:30 pm
Location: California, USA

Have self extracting exe and msi file?

Tue Dec 30, 2008 2:04 am

I posted this a couple of years ago and am finally getting around to redoing our installer. Mostly because there's lots of extra goodies with digitally signing our binaries now (nice work AdvancedInstaller!!).

We're packing all of the files into a single exe for simplicity with the initial installation (.net 3 runtime, plus other install prerequisites). We did an informal survey and about 70% of our users need these prerequisites upon initial install, so they definitely belong in the exe. We are also using the AutoUpdate feature.

So, I've run into a little bit of a catch 22.

Since our exe is 64 MB and the msi is 6MB, I would like the auto-updater to point to the msi file for updating, but have the users use the exe for the initial install since it includes the prerequisites. This is what I've done in the past, but I wrote a bunch of commandline utilities to create the exe myself using a third party component so that I can have this and the bare msi.

Is there a setting somewhere to leave the msi file there, plus make the full exe? I need both files. I can have my commandline utility unpack the files from the exe, but this isn't optimal. It would be best if AI left both files there.

Thanks,
Brian

Cosmin
Posts: 5797
Joined: Tue Jul 10, 2007 6:39 pm
Contact:  Website

Re: Have self extracting exe and msi file?

Tue Dec 30, 2008 9:41 am

Hi Brian,

What you need can be done by using two builds in the Media page. One build can be configured to generate an EXE with the files inside and the other build can be used to generate only the MSI (the prerequisites need to be included only in the EXE build). The two build should use different folders for the generated files so no conflicts can appear.

Regards,
Cosmin
Cosmin Pirvu - Advanced Installer Team
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