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Can anyone tell me how to make a universal transform or a template transform that will work on all msi's?

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Question

Can anyone tell me how to make a universal transform or a template transform that will work on all msi's?

Answer

The trick is to get the validation conditions on the transform to be lenient.

The following validation conditions are available for a transform (these are stored in the transform's summary information stream):

 MSITRANSFORM_VALIDATE_LANGUAGE
MSITRANSFORM_VALIDATE_PRODUCT
MSITRANFORM_VALIDATE_UPGRADECODE

Any one of the following version specifications (which would also have a validation equality flag as well)

 MSITRANSFORM_VALIDATE_MAJORVERSION
MSITRANSFORM_VALIDATE_MINORVERSION
MSITRANSFORM_VALIDATE_UPDATEVERSION

You would basically want to not validate any of the transform validation conditions that ensure product code, upgrade code, product version, and product language matching.

Depending on the types of changes you are making, you may want to suppress all of the error conditions as well to ensure that the transform can be applied without failure.

More specifics on the transform summary information stream can be found in the MsiCreateTransformSummaryInfo API documentation.

You can easily accomplish this using the msitran.exe tool provided in the Windows Installer SDK development tools section.

A no validation suppress all error transform would be generated using something similar to:

 msitran -g simple.msi simple2.msi simple.mst abcdef

Hope this helps,
- Carolyn Napier
Microsoft Windows Installer Team

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[Author: Robert Flaming]

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