Uninstall another MSI on install

Question

I have a Basic MSI project. I need to remove another MSI product on installation that is now integrated into our main application. I tried to use the upgrade scenarios and treat it as a major upgrade. However, this didn't work because of the upgrade codes not matching I believe.

Next, I also made a custom action that ran msiexec.exe after the CostFinalize (I think this was stated in the Installshield help.) This worked perfectly until I installed on a system that didn't have the installer I was looking to remove. My installer would fail if the other obsolete product was not installed. I tried to put a condition on the custom action set by the system search, but it seems the system search is limited in functionality. I can't just check a reg key and set a boolean property.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

A few things to consider

1) The UpgradeTable ( FindRelatedProducts / RemoveExisting Products ) can be used to remove ProductCodes associated with another product's UpgradeCode.

2) If memory serves, MSI won't remove a Per-User product during a Per-Machine install ( or the other way around ). The context has to be the same.

3) The UI Sequence doesn't run during silent installs.

4) You can't run msiexec from the execute sequence because there is a system wide mutex of only one execute sequence per machine.

5) If you schedule in UI ( I already told you that you shouldn't since it doesn't run during silent installs ) there is another mutex that says only 1 UI per process.

If you are going from per-user to per-user or per-machine to per-machine, I would think it's reasonaable you should be able to do what you want using Upgrade elements / table rows without writing custom actions. Otherwise you'll need a setup.exe style bootstrapper to handle the uninstall prior to entering the msiexec world.