Combining Uninstall / Change on same button in ARP Panell

Have you ever noticed that double-clicking any program / entry in Add / Remove Programs panel triggers Uninstallation and the application will be removed completely? The user does not have choice to select the options from the maintenance mode window. I have observed this behaviour with Installers created in Wise as well as InstallShield.
This article focus on the limitation associated with this behaviour in InstallShield Basic MSI project and provides a workaround for the same.

Further exploration unveiled that for some applications, the default action (bolded item) is "Uninstall/Change", where as a Basic MSI project created in InstallShield has 3 options as "Uninstall", "Change" and "Repair" and the default (in Bold) action is "Uninstall". My current case is to have "Uninstall/Change" option for our software instead of 3 Options.

For this InstallShield provided a solution with a disclaimer that this has not been tested at their end! But the solution worked like a charm for our application and hence would like to share it ..

By default, Windows Installer allows the creation of the “Repair”, “Change” and “Uninstall” buttons in order to maintain your application. The downside of this method is that the “Repair” and “Uninstall” actions are done in a basic user interface. There is no direct method available in InstallShield to achieve this. But tweaking some registry entries, you can make changes in display of ARP. You can make appropriate backup of registry and then try it.

For displaying Uninstall\Change on same button in ARP, disable all display options under General information->Add/Remove programs.

In the registry options, create the following registry key under the Current User/ Local Machine hive:

Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\MyApplication

where MyApplication is the Product Name you assigned for them.

In MyApplication registry key, create the following registry entries..

Name	Type	Data
DisplayIcon	REG_SZ	[SystemFolder]msiexec.exe
DisplayName	REG_SZ	[ProductName]
HelpLink	REG_SZ	[ARPHELPLINK]
InstallLocation	REG_SZ	[APPDIR]
Publisher	REG_SZ	[Manufacturer]
UninstallPath	REG_SZ	[SystemFolder]msiexec.exe /i [ProductCode]
UninstallString	REG_SZ	[SystemFolder]msiexec.exe /i [ProductCode]
URLUpdateInfo	REG_SZ	[ARPURLINFOABOUT]
DisplayVersion	REG_SZ	[ProductVersion]
Language	REG_DWORD	[ProductLanguage]
URLUpdateInfo	REG_SZ	[ARPURLUPDATEINFO]
URLInfoAbout	REG_SZ	[ARPURLINFOABOUT]
Comments	REG_SZ	[ARPCOMMENTS]

 

Then add the ARPSYSTEMCOMPONENT to Property Manager and set the value as 1.

After successful installation, you can view the "Uninstall/Change" button on your application from Add / Remove Programs Panel.

[Note: This information has been verified with a Basic MSI project created in InstallShield 2012 Spring Edition.]

Forcefully removing the 'Installation Directory' during uninstallation..

Most frequent defect that is logged against an Application Package is around "the installation directory not deleted during uninstallation" and we all know that based on Windows Installer design, the files / folders that are not created by the installer will not be removed by the installer. But the user would always want a clean system after uninstallatoin :)

So here you go with the approach to remove the installation directory via Direct Editor.

In the following example, I have a Basic MSI Project created using InstallShied 2012 Spring edition and assume that your application would create some files in the installed directory after installation, which would invalidate the removal of installation directory during uninstallation. The same solution applies to InstallScript MSI Project as well.

Take a look at the RemoveFiles table. You can remove specific files and files using wildcards. Once you remove those files, the folder should get removed as well on uninstall.
Something like the following should do the trick:
_MyFilesToRemove, <SomeComponentKey>, *.*, INSTALLDIR, 2

where <SomeComponentKey> is a key to an entry in the Component table. Any component will do, but if there is an .exe that actually creates the binary files, then perhpas you would want to use that .exe's component as you would only want the files to get removed when the corresponding .exe is removed.
Also, you may want to change *.* to *.<SomeSpecificExtension>

[Note: The above solution is basically an excerpt from MartinMarkevics's post in a community website.]