InstallShield 2012 Spring Express Edition User Guide

Chapter 8: Organizing Files for Your Installation
Including Redistributables in Your Installation
installation, the Windows Installer engine evaluates only the feature prerequisites and—if appropriate—installs them in the
order that you specified.
To learn about the differences between setup prerequisites and feature prerequisites (which are the two types of
InstallShield prerequisites), see Setup Prerequisites vs. Feature Prerequisites.
Configuring a Release that Includes InstallShield Prerequisites
When you package an installation that includes InstallShield prerequisites, you can use any one of the
following methods for supplying the InstallShield prerequisite files to end users:
• Store the InstallShield prerequisite files on the source media.
• Compress the InstallShield prerequisite files into Setup.exe, to be extracted at run time, as needed.
• If necessary, your installation can download the InstallShield prerequisite files that are included in
your project from the URL that is specified in the InstallShield prerequisite file (.prq) for each
prerequisite.
You can specify different methods for each InstallShield prerequisite in your project. To learn more, see
Specifying a Run-Time Location for a Specific InstallShield Prerequisite.
You can also override individual methods at the release level if you want all of the InstallShield
prerequisites in a release to be available through the same method. For more information, see Specifying
the Run-Time Location for InstallShield Prerequisites at the Release Level.
Edition: InstallShield Premier Edition and InstallShield Professional Edition enable you to configure an InstallShield
prerequisite so that it is installed either before or after any installation of the Windows Installer engine and the .NET
Framework.
Specifying the Directories that Contain InstallShield Prerequisites
The default location for InstallShield prerequisite files (.prq) is:
InstallShield Program Files Folder\SetupPrerequisites
InstallShield lets you specify additional or alternative locations on your local machine, or on a network.
This flexibility enables you to store InstallShield prerequisites in source code control and to share a
common set of InstallShield prerequisites with other team members.
InstallShield offers several ways for specifying the search paths for InstallShield prerequisite files (.prq):
• If you are editing or building from within InstallShield, use the Prerequisites tab on the Options
dialog box—which is displayed when you click Options on the Tools menu—to specify a commadelimited
list of machine-wide folders and current-user folders.
• If you are building from the command line with ISCmdBld.exe, use the -prqpath parameter to
specify a comma-delimited list of folders.
If you use an .ini file to specify ISCmdBld.exe parameters, you can use the PrerequisitePath
parameter in the [Mode] section of your .ini file to specify a comma-delimited list of folders.
• If you are building through MSBuild or Team Foundation Server (TFS), use the PrerequisitePath
parameter on the InstallShield task. This parameter is exposed as the ItemGroup
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