Detect Office 2013 / 2016 as Click-To-Run installation

[Brahnsuk]

Hi,

we've an AddIn for Microsoft Visio. I already have some CustomSearches (Custom Behaviour - Searches) for Visio 2010/2013 (x86 and x64) which work quite well for an MSI installation.
For this searches I checked the registry key "InstalledVersion" under "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Visio" and 'retrieve the raw value'.
Unfortunately if Office is installed as "Click-To-Run" version these keys don't exist.
I already search a while how I can solve this problem. I know there is a "VirtualOutlook" key (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/librar ... 64733.aspx) where I can detect if it is a C2R or not. But I've two problems:

1. Our product don't need Office installed to run, so I preferred the way to find the "InstalledVersion" key of Visio, to determine if it is a 2013 or 2016 Version.
2. After more investigation I found that the CTR-Version creates registry values under "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\REGISTRY\MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office\16.0", but it looks like that AI can't find these keys...

What's your suggestion to detect an Office Click-To-Run (especially "Visio") installation?

Thanks in advanced!

[Bogdan]

Hi,

The searches you define in the package can search the Wow6432Node too. It all depends on the bitness of your MSI and on the state
of the option "Search the 64-bit portion of the registry".

You don't need to specify the Wow6432Node path explicitly, just specify the normal path and the OS will do the redirection or not to Wow6432Node.

Regards,
Bogdan

[Brahnsuk]

Hi Bogdan,

thank you for your reply.
Thank you for the hint with "Wow6432Node" but that's not the problem, that was only a sample/try to solve my problem.
Unlike the normal MSI installation, the C2R creates the "Wow6432Node" not between "\SOFTWARE\" and "\Microsoft\" (like "HLKM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft...."), it'll be created in a subkey at "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\REGISTRY\MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\", so I guess maybe I have define that path exactly.

Attached are two screenshots where you can see how I defined my searches for the click-to-run versions.

02.png (34.49 KiB) Viewed 35335 times

If I try to find this subkey with wizard (" ... "-Button), I don't can move to this key, only until "ClickToRun" and there are no further subkeys.

01.png (97.36 KiB) Viewed 35335 times

Can you confirm this? Do you now understand my problem? If you have any further questions, let it me know.

[Brahnsuk]

Is there something new about the problem?
Or am I doing something wrong?
Need more information / help?

[Daniel]

Hello,

You should indeed define the registry key path exactly as it is. Please edit your 64-bit search like this:

• Key: SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\REGISTRY\MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Visio
  Search the 64-bit portion of the registry: checked

Let us know if this helped.

All the best,
Daniel

[Brahnsuk]

Thank you for your help Daniel, that was the solution.
I think an additional fault of mine was that I sometimes not explicitly saved (and sometimes re-opened) the project, so searched doesn't recognize my changes that I made.

Only for completeness:
I created two searches. At both searches I checked the checkbox "Search the 64-bit portion of the registry". In combination with the "VersionNT64" variable, I'm able to determine which version is installed


V16_SAMEBIT_CTR - SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\REGISTRY\MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Visio
V16X86_X64_CTR - SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\REGISTRY\MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Visio

OSx64 / Vx64 - ((V16_SameBit <> "") AND (VersionNT64))
OSx64 / Vx86 - (V16x86_x64 <> "")
OSx86 / Vx86 - ((V16_SameBit <> "") AND (NOT VersionNT64))

[Daniel]

You're always welcome. I'm glad you got this working.

Also, thank you for sharing with us the complete solution. Certainly this will be useful for future users facing with the same scenario,

All the best,
Daniel

[Daniel]

Hi,

This improvement was added in version 16.4.1 of Advanced Installer released on October 8th, 2019.

All the best,
Daniel