Setting output directory in the command line

[waspy]

Dear Guys,

We'd like to suggest setting an output directory in the advancedinstaller.com command line arguments. This would be a great helper in simplifying automated builds like MSBuild where the Advanced Installer is called as the external process.

Thank you very much,
Alexei Dragoner

[Cosmin]

Hi Alexei,

I added this improvement on our TODO list and it will be available in a future version. Thank you for your suggestion.

Regards,
Cosmin

[gregmac]

I agree this would be a nice feature, though because AI uses relative paths there is a way around it:

In my project, I have the following checked into SVN:

• trunk\Installer\
• trunk\Installer\Installer.aip
• trunk\Installer\Staging
• trunk\Installer\Staging\Component1
• trunk\Installer\Staging\Component2
• trunk\Installer\Staging\Installer

What I do now is use "Staging\Installer" as the output directory, which gets stored as a relative path. This way it works no matter what system it's built on. I then just use an msbuild <copy> task to copy the setup.exe to the proper directory for my build server to archive it. This is an okay work-around, if you can tolerate modifying your checked-out directory (I always do a clean checkout prior to builds, so I don't care what happens to the files/folders during the build really).

(In the same vein, I use msbuild <copy> tasks to copy my project outputs into the Staging\ComponentX folders, and then in AI I have those set up as sync folders. This way, during a debug build, I can copy everything, and during a Release build, I leave out the .pdb and .xml files, and in both cases just use the same AI project.)