Advertised installation of Office Addin

[momarf]

I am creating an installer package with a feature that installs office add ins(Office 2010 or 2013). My feature organisation looks like following

• Main Application
  • Office Integration

"Main Application" feature is always installed and can be advertised with a link to my executable with advertise flag on. "Office integration" feature is the child feature of "Main Application" feature and has advertisement allowed but have no link to advertise as it only contains Office Addins.

When i run advertised installation using following command line:

Code: Select all

msiexec /jm Setup.msi

it only advertise the "Main Application" and only installs the feature. Office Integration is not installed.

When I install it using following command line:

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msiexec /i Setup.msi ADVERTISE=MainApplication,OfficeIntegration

it advertises the both features but when I click on icon in start menu installation only installs the Main Application. I can verify this with following line in the log

Code: Select all

Feature: OfficeIntegration; Installed: Advertise;   Request: Absent;   Action: Absent

Launching Office application (Word, Excel Powerpoint or Outlook) doesn't install the advertised feature either.

Can advertised install possible if there is not link advertised for application or through add in architecture of Office?

[Bogdan]

Hi,

As explained in our self-healing article the installation of an advertised feature can be triggered only by an entry point
from the same feature, not from a parent or sibling feature.

When the entry point it used (shortcut or file association) Windows Installer will check the state of all the components from that feature only. The components from the
child features will not be taken into account, so there is no way for a shortcut or file association from the main feature to trigger the install of the office addin feature.

Also, launching the Office app targeted by the addin has no effect because these are separate MSI packages with different features and components.
Windows Installer does not connect them in any manner, thus there is no way to trigger the installation like this. (Office knows to load the addin only because of the
registry entries our package writes and the manifest file that you included along with the addin)

Usually an add in is small, why would you want it installed as advertised? The usual practice is to automatically install the feature if the targeted Office version is
already on the machine or to skip it otherwise.

Regards,
Bogdan

[momarf]

Thanks for the explanation Bodgan. After spending some more time on it i came on the similar conclusion.