Add user input to prerequisite

Question

I have project with SQL Server 2012 as a prerequisite. I added it into

Application Data -> Redistributables

and everything works fine. Now I want to add possibilities to set a custom instance name for the SQL Server. Is it possible to do in InstallShield 2011?

If not, what is the best way to do such functionality?

Answer 1

You can edit the prerequisite to offer a pre-chosen custom instance name, but you probably cannot reasonably offer to let the user choose the instance name. (You might try using property substitutions and setting it up as a feature prerequisite, but I think you'll have problems with the conditions.)

In later versions of InstallShield, the Suite and the Suite/Advanced UI projects have better support for some of this, as you can easily wire up edit boxes to properties to command lines. Although even there I think you may run into problems specifying a variable condition to detect the customizable instance.