Customizing a Labwindows/CVI distribution

[bramn]

I created a distribution kit of my Labwindows/CVI application, the result being an installer of approximately 200MB. However diving deeper in the resulting set of files I found a "sub"-installer of approximately 7MB, which after testing in a "clean" Windows XP virtual machine turned out to be working perfectly ok! This sub-installer, which seems to be only installing the actual application is found in the /bin/dp folder. What do all other files do and why do I need them?

Continuing on this story, I'm trying to customize the installation procedure and GUI with a corporate logo and such. For that I try to import the MSI file, found in the above folder, in a tool called Advanced Installer. However this results in the following error:

Exception - The language with the id '9' is not supported.

How can I solve this error if at all?Is it also possible to somehow customize the "big" installer found above? It's an executable, not a MSI file. And do some of you know of other tools to create/customize installers?

[Mert_A.]

You can think of the .exe (and supporting files) as an installation coordinator that handles the installation of multiple software packages, one of which being your application. The "dp" installer is the one that installs all your application's files. There are a few reasons to install the whole thing by running the .exe, rather than just the .msi you find in the dp directory:

1. That's how it's intended to run. We don't really test running the .msi on its own, so I can't guarantee you won't run into problems.

2. Some of the options CVI gives you are executed as part of the installation coordinator. For example, the custom installer graphics, custom Readme/license displayed, or installer launch conditions. If you just run the .msi alone, you won't have these features.

3. If you install just your appliation without all the other "sub-installers," you may not have all the runtime components that your application needs. For example, your program almost certainly requires the CVI Run-Time Engine (contains the implementation of all the ANSI, UI, etc libraries). Unless the machine you're installing to already has a recent enough version of the CVI RTE installed, then your application won't run properly.

If you're interested in showing a corporate logo on your installer UI, then you can use the "Welcome Background Image" and "Banner Background Image" options that are on the General tab of the Edit Installer dialog. (See the help for more details.) But note that these options, as I mentioned in point (2) above, only work if you run the full installer from setup.exe.

You can try to make the overall distribution smaller by examining the selections on the Drivers & Components tab, and deselecting anything you don't want. If you just want to distribution your application -- you assume the target machines will have the necessary runtime components already -- you can deselect everything here. That will make your installer smaller, while still giving you the features like the custom installer graphics.

I can't really give any advice on Advanced Installer, as I'm not familiar with it. I hope this has helped answer some of your questions.