Infralution Support

[handa29]

Hi --

When users attempt to enter their license key into the licensing dialog, it often causes this error:

[Infralution]

The problem is that, by default, non-power users under XP and standard users under Vista do not have permissions to write into the Common App Data directory. This is a major pain in the neck - because it means that for these users there is no common directory (or even registry entry) where you are allow to write by default. Since you really don't want to install license keys in a users profile area this makes life a bit difficult.

One solution is to have your installer create a directory under the Common App directory which does have permissions for anyone to write to.

Unfortunately Visual Studio setup projects do not support setting directory permssions directly. But you can still achieve it by some post processing of the MSI using a VB script.

The first step is to add the Common Application Data directory in your Setup project. You do this by right clicking on the "File System on Target Machine" entry in the File System view and selecting "Add Special Folder". Unfortunately Microsoft, in their wisdom, did not put a short cut here for the "Common Application Data" directory - so you have to use the "Add Special Folder->Custom Folder" option. Change the name to "Common Application Data". Change the default location to "[CommonAppDataFolder]" Change the property to "COMMONAPPDATAFOLDER".

Next add a subdirectory for your company (this is good practice) and a sub-sub-directory (if you want) for your product/license files.

Now your installer will create the folder where your license files will be stored - but it will still have the default permissions. Since Visual Studio doesn't support setting permissions on setup folders we will have to post-process the MSI file to do this.

The first step to doing this is to download and install the Microsoft installer tool (Orca) - this is included as part of the microsoft platform SDK. Once you have installed Orca you should be able to right click on MSI files and open them for editing.

Select the Directory table of the MSI file and locate the entry corresponding to the Common App Data sub-directory you created. Note the Directory ID.

Select the Component table of the MSI - find the first component with the Directory set to TARGETDIR. Note the Component Name (should start with "C__").

Next modify the script below to insert the Directory and Component IDs that you found above in the appropriate places (replacing the existing IDs - _BB68B486E4BF43CFA85C8FD7861ED3A5 and C__BF0BC627559B46439555D94FAC5F6151)

[SwissKnife]

Many thanks for your script. Your solution is great, but I have used an other component identifier.


The solution takes the following component:
Select the Component table of the MSI - find the first component with the Directory set to TARGETDIR. Note the Component Name (should start with "C__").

I use this component:
Select the Component table of the MSI - find the first component with the Directory set to the Directory ID noted above. Note the Component Name (should start with "C__").

Good luck
Christian

[CynoxDev]

EDIT:
I found the problem. The AlwaysCreate property for the target folder was set to true. Thus the entry in the CreateFolder table already existed and caused the script failed when trying to insert a row with the same primary key.
-----

Hi.

When i execute the script, i get the following error:

>cscript script.vbs installer.msi

Msi API Error 80004005: Execute,Params
1: 2259 2: installer.msi 3: 4:

I don't have any experience with vb-Script and MSI, so maybe you can give me some pointers what could be going wrong.

Thank you,
Marcus