Microsoft Office 2007 automated installation - editing the config.xml file

Question

I'm creating an automated installation of Office 2007. To customise your Office 2007 installation the Office Customization Tool (OCT) does most of the work for you. One the OCT's features is the ability to run additional programs during the Office installation. However it is pretty poor at it.

Fortunately by editing the appropiate config.xml file contained within the installer files you have more control over running these additional programs. Within the config.xml file this feature is defined by the command element. This link on TechNet talks all about it.

In this documentation it states:

Attributes
You can specify double-quotation marks (") in the Path and Args attributes by specifying two double-quotation marks together ("").
<Command Path="myscript.exe" Args="/id ""123 abc"" /q" />

I would like to use double-quotation marks in an argument that I wish to pass to the command I'm executing. Unfortunately when I configure my config.xml file as shown in the example, the Office 2007 installer crashes and displays the following error message in the setup logs:

Parsing config.xml at: \\aumel1pc356\c$\Documents and Settings\nichollsd2\Desktop\source\office\Enterprise.WW\config.xml
Error: XML document load failed for file: \\aumel1pc356\c$\Documents and Settings\nichollsd2\Desktop\source\office\Enterprise.WW\config.xml HResult: 0x1.

Does anyone have any experience with this issue? I'd love to get another perspective on it.

Answer 1

In standard XML you embed quotes in attribute values using ", &34; or .

See the page on Wikipedia for a list of XML entity references.

I don't know if this will solve your problem, but seeing as it is an XML parser error it should.