dpend
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Mar 16, 2017 11:13 pm

Modify Installer At Download

Thu Mar 16, 2017 11:26 pm

Hi all,

First up: Sorry if this is covered elsewhere, I honestly did try to look around but didn't find anything.

My program requires registration on my website to operate, so I thought I may be able to bundle the login information into the installer at download. I've been able to disable compression and dynamically edit a placeholder file inside the installer during download for each user, that's easy enough. However, the installer fails with an invalid checksum error, as it should do of course since that's what checksums are for.

Is there any way I can disable checksums in the installer package? Or maybe I can add a different feature to the installer which contains just this file and disable checksums only on that part, something like that. Or maybe it's impossible, or I'm going about it entirely wrong and doing things the hard way. I don't mind if this is set up as a .EXE or a .MSI or as a web installer.

Thanks in advance for the help.
Dave.

Bogdan
Posts: 2791
Joined: Tue Jul 07, 2009 7:34 am
Contact:  Website

Re: Modify Installer At Download

Fri Mar 17, 2017 4:58 pm

Hi Dave,

Here is what you can try, without building a custom installer for each download.

Advanced Installer has a support for "File Download Operations" which allows you to point the installer to an URL from where it downloads a file, at install time.

The URL field accepts a property reference, this means that you can pass a custom URL at install time, from where your file is downloaded. For example, if the registration
depends on a unique customer ID, you can generate on your server a file with that name (which can be different from the name of the file when it gets installed), and
as the user for the ID during the installation, in a custom dialog (edit box control). Now that you have the ID, you practically know the full URL of the file
and have the installer download it automatically.

I don't understand exactly the steps from your registration process, but the above support might help you solve your problem. If you still can't find a solution
please tell us more about the registration, what does it do? (it generates a special file for each user? etc...)

Regards,
Bogdan
Bogdan Mitrache - Advanced Installer Team
Follow us: Twitter - Facebook - YouTube

dpend
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Mar 16, 2017 11:13 pm

Re: Modify Installer At Download

Sat Mar 18, 2017 12:04 pm

Hi Bogdan,

Thank you for your help, it helped me find the feature I was looking for but didn't know existed.

Your downloading of a file would have worked. I would have had to modify the .MSI file during download to point to a different location for each user, then have a script on the website return a file mirroring information in the URL back to the file. It worked fine, but was a bit clumsy and requires the installer to have an internet connection which is not optimal. But it did show me there are some values I can edit while the user is downloading the .MSI file

My installer now has a .INI file generated during the installation which contains just 2 static values. These values are changed (and padded with white space) by the website while the file is downloaded by a user. The upshot of this is that once installed the program already has the users login credentials.

Thanks again.

Dave.

Return to “Building Installers”