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Software Repackaging (InstallShield Repackager)

InstallShield recommends launching the Repackager remotely from a clean system to ensure that only relevant changes are included in the resulting Windows Installer Package. The wizard presented by the Repackager gathers pertinent information for your package (see below) and then automatically performs an analysis of your system, launches the specified setup program and performs the post installation analysis in order to create an MSI package that contains these differences...

Before performing the initial analysis of your system, you are given the opportunity to customize this process through a tabbed interface that gives you control over all aspects of the analysis. Default exclusion lists for the registry and file system are provided to cover elements that would often need to be manually cleaned out of the resulting package. You may reset any custom changes you make to the default settings or you may load predefined settings from an INI file. What seems to be lacking here is a way to intuitively generate an INI file with your own settings (there is no "export settings" option.) When asked how to reuse non-standard settings, without having to edit the defaults each time, InstallSheild recommended taking the isrepackager.ini (analysis settings for a particular instance) from the <Windows> folder, renaming it to defaults.ini, and using that file to replace the defaults.ini file in the same folder as isrepackager.exe. This may not be the most intuitive method for specifying your own defaults, but it is not likely something you will need to do often (if at all.)

As the initial scan of your computer takes place, any directories containing INI formatted files that are discovered result in a prompt which asks if you wish to include any of those files in the analysis. This is a nice touch as traditionally these are things you have to identify and address after you have created your package. While you can answer "Yes to all" here, there is no similar option to answer "No to all." If you are working on a "clean machine" as InstallShield suggests this will not pose much of an issue, but if you are performing repackaging operations on a baseline machine or one with several applications installed, you may tire of answering this dialog before your through!

You are then prompted to answer "OK" when you are ready to have the setup file (specified earlier) execute. The wizard recognizes when the launched setup has released control of the system and will prompt you to allow the second analysis of your computer to take place. It is the differences between these two scans of your system that make up the changes instituted by the setup program being repackaged. This information is collected into an INC (Repackager Project) file and the source files are then copied to the project folder for this particular package.

If an MSI authoring tool is detected locally, we are presented with the default option to create a MSI file with this information. By deselecting this option, the "create" button changes to a "next" button (as it would be if no MSI authoring program were locally detected). Pressing the "next" button informs you that you have created an INC file and that file's location. It would be helpful if an option to open this file with your MSI authoring tool were presented at this time, but the wizard ends here.

Launching InstallShield Author to edit this new project takes us into our next section… 

Read on...

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