Software Deployment

I've never run into an msi that will install by clicking a file that it will be assocated with after install.

I believe that by nature the application will only install if you run the advertised short cut. I don't see how Windows Installer would know how to associate PDF's with Adobe Acrobat if it's not installed.

Well thats where youre wrong...

Take winrar for instance, you can repackage that to an msi easily.
Then advertise it to a target system. (durting advertise it will only shoot FileTypes into the registry , you can check this by capturing the advertise)
Now the target system has in its registry something like .rar, .z, tar, etc etc wich it should open with WinRar.exe.
Directly after advertising, the file icon changes into the rar icon. (here i mean the .rar or .tar files already on the system)
And once you try to open such a file for the firts time it will start the MSI and install WinRar.

This is normal MSI behaviour, and its lacking from "every" Adobe msi.

silver is right and you can also use the MIME table to create MIME types so that if a user clicks on a PDF in a webpage and Adobe Reader isnt installed but advertised....it will install on the double click.

Hi Jim,

Could I bother you to expand a little bit on this? I've got a transform for Adobe Acrobat reader 7 that I've created a parent feature for, that has all the Current User registry settings in it. Its structured like so, with the asterisk next to the feature I created:


Installation Features
CustomiseFeature *
ReaderProgram Files
Reader_Big_Features


Self healing of these settings works fine when we run Reader from the shortcuts. I've added a file association for .pdf (which is in the feature ReaderProgramFiles) - however it still doesn't self heal when running from either double clicking on a .pdf or running one from IE. In the File Assocations view of Wise, I've set up:

Extension: pdf
ProgID: AcroExch.Document

and MIME Type is set to application/pdf

What have I done wrong?

Rgds

Paul