generate log file from setup with installshield 2012 - logging

Question

am using basic MSI project to prepare setup.exe. Which is running very well on many of my client machines and creating serious issues on few PC's. now i would like to add a logging as part of setup.exe.

Requirement is on either success or failure installation i want to generate a log file to know what happened exactly behind the scenes. here am having few VBScripting also included.

i had a command line parameter.

setup.exe /v"/l*v C:\LogFile31122012.log"

but i would like to generate it on clicking setup.exe file itself. and also the filename shouldn't be harcoded.

Any clues might help a lot. i tried with installshield project --> build --> setting menu. but couldn't get any breakthrough.

thanks in advance.

Regards, Pavan

Answer 1

As long as your target machines are running Windows Installer 4.0 or later, you can set the MsiLogging property (via the setting in the General Information view), and a log file will be created in %TEMP%.

If your target machines are running an earlier version of Windows Installer, or if you need to control the directory or filename, you can store some command-line parameters into setup.exe. However I don't know of a good way to tweak the filename here to ensure the file doesn't already exist (both %DATE% and %TIME% may contain characters that cannot be used in a filename, and %RANDOM% doesn't provide much meaning).