Open topic with navigation

Setup Design View

InstallShield 2015

Project: The Setup Design view is available in the following project types:

The most important step in designing any installation is to lay out the various elements, the building blocks of the installation. You need to think both from the end user’s perspective, as well as your own.

You can design the entire installation hierarchy for your application visually under the Setup Design view. This is the only view in which you can associate components with features and subfeatures.

Features

Features are the building blocks of your application from the end user’s perspective. They can be installed or uninstalled based on the end user’s selections. Your entire application should be divided into discrete features that perform a specific purpose. Features can be created in both the Setup Design view and the Features view.

Components

Components enable you to group your application data together. Unlike features, components constitute the developer’s view of a project—containing data such as files, registry entries, and shortcuts. Components are associated with features in the Setup Design view, and a component may belong to more than one feature. Components can be created in both the Setup Design view and the Components view.

Tip: The Components section contains the Files, Registry Entries, and Shortcuts nodes, in addition to the Advanced Settings for the component. If you do not want to see the subordinate nodes when they do not contain data, right-click Setup Design and select Show Only Nodes with Data. When this option is selected, only the nodes that contain data are displayed.

DIMs

Developer installation manifest (DIMs) are separate pieces of an installation project that can be incorporated into a Basic MSI project to create a complete product installation. You can divide your product into separate, logical units to foster collaboration, enable distributed installation development, and enable reuse.

Redistributables

Redistributables enable you to install distinct, pre-existing pieces of functionality. For example, if your application requires Visual Basic run-time .dll files, you can include the Visual Basic Virtual Machine merge module, rather than add a file to your installation project and trying to determine its installation requirements.

Note: You can add redistributables—including InstallShield prerequisites, merge modules, and objects—to your installation in the Redistributables view (or the Prerequisites view in InstallScript projects and the Objects view in InstallScript and InstallScript Object projects).

Files, Registry Data, and Shortcuts

Files, registry data, and shortcuts are elements that are added to a component to complete the hierarchy.

Advanced Settings

Advanced Component Settings let you handle installation of components with special requirements. By specifying the advanced settings, you can publish your component and register COM servers, file extension servers, MIME types, and so on. You can also use the component’s advanced settings to create an application paths entry in the registry.

See Also

Feature Settings

Component Settings

Installation Fundamentals