jordanv_123lb
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed May 15, 2019 4:45 pm

Different configurations for per user and system installs?

Mon Jun 03, 2019 4:46 pm

Currently our application (exe installer with the Professional license of Advanced Installer) installs, the user has to hit the check for update button.

I've been working on and testing the silent update feature using a timer in the app itself, since the app launches at startup the update checker doesn't need to be running outside the app anyway.

The tests went great, silent updates work fine, but then I decided to test an edge case, since a lot of our customers don't have admin privileges to their PCs. I tested per user installs. This went horribly as you can imagine, the installer just complained that this wasn't possible, which after looking up is because when installing the service that assists with silent installs, you need to guarantee the user has administrative privileges, which can only be done on the system install option? This could partially be solved by checking if the user has admin rights, but it doesn't seem to let that even try to happen. There's also the other dilemma I originally outlined of the person doing the per user install not having admin rights whatsoever.

I've looked around in the documentation and the tool itself, but the ideal solution seems to be having a fork in the installer on the per user vs system install page: system install does the whole install the service to facilitate silent updates, and then have the per user option not install the service, and then I'd have some sort of flag set in the application itself to detect which way it was installed, and either call silent updates or non-silent updates based on that, since silent updates wouldn't work without the service.

I know the easy solution: two installers. My boss thinks that's far less than ideal, and I'm inclined to agree with him.

Has anyone experienced a similar issue and found a solution? If I left out any relevant info or something needs clarification let me know.

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

Re: Different configurations for per user and system installs?

Thu Jun 06, 2019 2:25 pm

Hello and welcome to our forums,

Indeed we do not have built-in support to detect the installation context (per-user or per-machine) and install or not the support service option for our Updater tool. But as a workaround you can try to implement a similar solution like the one exposed on our "Make "install support service" for updates optionnal ?" thread.

Hope this helps.

All the best,
Daniel
Daniel Radu - Advanced Installer Team
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