Saturday, April 26, 2008

Accessing Installation Properties in Custom Actions

Assume you have a custom action for your installer and you'd like to access a parameter (or call it a variable or property) from within your installer. That property might have been set by another installer, e.g. a file search, or it could be part of the set of properties that are standard during installation, e.g. "TargetDir". Let's take TargetDir as an example. When you work on your setup project within Visual Studio (2005) it offers a number of macros for properties. E.g. when you want to specify the location for a folder that you'd like to create during install you can use [PersonalFolder] and others to specify the actual location. In order to pass such a variable to your custom action, simply open the Custom Actions editor for your setup project. Then select the custom action and then add the parameter in the "CustomActionData" property using the following syntax:
/TargetDir="[TARGETDIR]\"
Please note the trailing backslash, which you only need to use when you surround the property in double quotes. However, as a safety measure I suggest making it a habit to always add the double quotes and the backslash. Remember paths can and will contain spaces! In some examples on the internet the backslash may be mentiond in the text but not be included in the code sample. If you leave the backslash out you'll see a message box containing "error code 2869". However, this article makes it clear that you must add the trailing backslash if you use the double quotes. Also, if you want to pass more than one property separate them by a single space, e.g.
/TargetDir="[TARGETDIR]\" /UserDir="[PersonalFolder]\"
Then in your custom action implementation - a class derived from System.Configuration.Install.Installer - you can access it in the following way (C# here, but similar in other .NET languages):
string targetDir = Context.Parameters["TargetDir"];
That's all.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

However, what happens if an argument to be passed to the custom action contains matching brackets? Instead of being passed through, it is treated incorrectly as a property. Do you know of any way around this?

Manfred Lange said...

Hi anonymous,

I'm afraid I don't at the moment. If you become aware of a solution I'd be happy to append it to this post. And give credits to you, of course!

Manfred.

Anonymous said...

The solution to passing literal brackets is found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa368609.aspx. Bullet point number 5 at the link shows how to use escape characters to pass literal brackets.

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