Problem with "...may require additional dependencies..." during patch (MSP) installation

Question

Symptons

I have a newly created patch. It installs over the RTM installation without problems. But it displays the following message, "This installation may require additional dependencies. Without its dependencies, [My App] may not work correctly. Would you like to find the original [My App.exe]?"

Since my original setup is a single file .exe (web setup), this is kind of an annoying and scary message to present to the end user. The user may not even have saved the original setup program or know where to find it again.

Details

My original web installer actually installs installs a complete copy of the extracted MSI file into "[PathToCurrentUser]\Local Settings\Application Data\Downloaded Installation{Some GUID}\". But the patch looks for the exe file, not the MSI file.

Is there any way, either through the original web installer (I haven't released it to the public yet) or through the patch to instruct the patching process to find the extracted MSI and not the EXE?

If I can't get rid of the dire warning message I might opt to release full MSIs rather than partial patches to provide a better user experience.

Answer 1

This is part of InstallShield's feature prerequisite support, and it's looking for the bootstrap setup.exe. You can disable this by changing the condition on the ISInstallPrerequsites action in the Install UI Sequence, and you should be able to do this in either the base image or the upgraded image, just so long as it's modified by the time the patch is installing. More recent versions of InstallShield have started using the following condition:

NOT(EXECUTEMODE~="NONE") AND NOT(PATCH AND Installed)

(Sorry for the late answer; I happened across this post when searching for the answer to a related problem, and hope this is still useful for you.)

Answer 2

I just ran into a similar error that gave me the same message. I am using a single compressed exe for my installer, and running setup.exe from C:\ would prompt with that dialog box, but if you put it anywhere else (e.g. C:\test) it works just fine.