Setup Prerequisites

InstallShield 12

PROJECT

Setup prerequisites can be included in Windows Installer and ClickOnce projects.

InstallShield provides several third-party redistributables that you can incorporate into your project as setup prerequisites. A setup prerequisite is a base application or component that must be installed on the target machine before your application can be installed. If you include more than one setup prerequisite in an installation, you can specify the order in which the prerequisites should be installed. Some examples of setup prerequisites are Java Runtime Environment (JRE), Jet 4.0, and SQL Server 2005 Express Edition.

Including setup prerequisites in your project enables you to chain multiple .msi files together into a single Setup.exe file, bypassing the Windows Installer limitation that enables only one .msi file to be executed at a time. The Redistributables view is where you add setup prerequisites to a Windows Installer–based project. The Installation Requirements page is where you add setup prerequisites to a ClickOnce project.

When InstallShield builds a Setup.exe file for a project that does not include any prerequisites, it starts with the base Setup.exe file stored in the following location:

InstallShield Program Files Folder\redist\Language Independent\i386

However, when InstallShield builds a Setup.exe file for a project that includes prerequisites, the aforementioned Setup.exe file cannot be used as the base because it does not have the capability of including prerequisites. A slightly larger file called SetupPrereq.exe is used instead. This base SetupPrereq.exe file is located in the same directory as the base Setup.exe file. Since two different base files—Setup.exe and SetupPrereq.exe—are used, only installation authors who are actually including prerequisites in their projects incur the additional size overhead in the final, built Setup.exe file that is distributed to end users.