Understanding Property Attributes for Informed Home Buying Decisions

Table of Contents

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Feature Properties

General

Identifier

This is the key used to identify a specific feature. It is used in conditions to refer to the installed state or the action state of a feature or in some Windows Installer Properties like ADDLOCAL, ADDSOURCE, REINSTALL, REMOVE, etc.

When changing a feature’s identifier, all the conditions and properties that refer to this identifier must be updated accordingly.

Description

This text will appear in the Customize Dialog when the feature is selected in the features tree. You can localize this value.

Feature Tree

There are three options for the initial display of a feature:

Not Displayed - the feature will not be displayed to the user in any dialog
Display Collapsed - the feature will be displayed collapsed in the features tree from the Customize dialog
Display Expanded - the feature will be displayed expanded in the features tree.

The state of “collapsed” or “expanded” makes sense only if the feature has sub-features.

Icon

The feature will have the selected icon prepended in the Quick Selection List control.

Mark components in this feature as “64-bit component”

All the components from the feature are marked as 64-bit components.

Mark components in this feature as “Do not register with Windows Installer”

If this option is selected all the components from the feature will have an empty GUID, and thus it will not be registered. This means that the components cannot be removed, repaired or patched by the installer. This might be useful if you intend to service/uninstall the components yourself (using a custom action, for instance).

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Mark System components in this feature as “permanent”

If this option is selected, any component of the current feature to be installed in a system folder (system32, ProgramData, etc) will be marked as permanent (it will not be removed during an uninstall).

Installation behavior

Every feature has an attached integer number which represents the feature’s “Install level”. This install level is compared with the user-selected application install level and it dictates if the feature should be installed or not. There are three well-known install levels values: 0 (Disabled), 1 (Typical) and 4 (Complete).

You can select one of the following install behavior for the feature base on a correspondent install level:

Installed (Install Level 1 - Typical).
The feature will be installed on both Typical and Complete installations. The user can choose not to install it from “CustomizeDlg” when performing a Custom installation.
Not installed (Install Level 4 - Complete).
The feature will not be installed on a Typical installation. The user can choose to install it from “CustomizeDlg” when performing a Custom installation or by performing a Complete installation from “SetupTypeDlg”.
Disabled (Install Level 0 - Disabled).
The feature will be disabled. The user cannot change its installation state. It will not be displayed during the installation.

You can set install levels other than Installed, Not Installed and Disable in theConditional Levels Dialog . Use the [More Options ] link to edit additional conditional install levels for the selected feature.

“Installation Behavior“ fields should not contain conditions based on a feature’s or component’s state because the expressions in these fields are evaluated before the installer checks the state of features and components. The expressions will always return false due to this fact.

Install Settings

Install feature locally
The feature and all its resources will be copied to the target computer.
Run feature from the installation source
The components of this feature that are not marked for local installation will be installed to run from source. This is the default behavior, which the user can change from the Customize dialog.
Use parent feature installation settings
The feature’s state is the same as the parent feature’s state. This option is available only if the feature has a parent.
Always install the feature
The User Interface of Windows Installer does not display an option to change the feature’s state. The “Entire feature will be unavailable” option will not be available for this feature in “CustomizeDlg.”

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Advertise Settings

Configure the settings available from a feature’s context menu in the CustomizeDlg dialog during installation.

Allow advertise

This feature can be installed as advertised but this is not the default installation option.

The default installation state is advertised.
The feature will be installed by default as advertised.
Disable advertise if the target system doesn’t support it
Advertising for this feature is disabled if the shell does not support the Windows Installer descriptors.

Disable advertise

The feature is not allowed to be advertised.

Builds

In case you have defined more that one build in the Builds page, you can choose to remove the feature from some builds. If a feature is removed from a build, all other resources that demand that feature (components, component members, class entries, type libraries…) will also be removed from the build.

Include feature in all builds

Use this option if the feature should be present in all your builds.

Include feature only in the selected builds

This option allows you to specify the exact builds that will contain the feature. You can select those builds in the list below.

Topics

Conditional Levels Dialog
The “Conditional Levels” dialog in Advanced Installer.

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Understanding Property Attributes for Informed Home Buying Decisions