Make folder hidden after Inno Setup installs it

Question

My application has a folder of files that are all marked as "hidden" (including the folder itself). However, Inno Setup won't copy them for installation unless I remove the "hidden" attribute first.

Fair enough, but is there a way to make Inno Setup mark the installed folder as "hidden" after it finishes setup on my end-user's machine?

Thanks.

Answer 1

See the Attribs parameter for entries in the [Dirs] section.

[Dirs]
Name: "{app}\blah"; Attribs: hidden;

Note that this won't really stop people from seeing it, just make it look like you have something to hide.

Answer 2

First of all, ensure that ONLY the directory is hidden, and not the subdirectory. Say its name is srcHiddenDir. Now, create another directory dstHiddenDir, but dont make it hidden now. But it should be empty.

Then, open the settings.json, and replace all the occurrences of srcHiddenDir with dstHiddenDir.

Now, Make it ready to copy files as usual. In one part of the code, you will get:

[Files]

Source: "wherethewholecodeis\phpdesktop\phpdesktop-chrome.exe"; DestDir: "{app}"; Flags: ignoreversion
Source: "wherethewholecodeis\*"; DestDir: "{app}"; Flags: ignoreversion recursesubdirs createallsubdirs
Source: "wherethewholecodeis\*srcHiddenDir*\*"; DestDir: "{app}\*dstHiddenDir*"; Attribs:hidden; Flags: ignoreversion recursesubdirs createallsubdirs

Then, you need to write:

[Dirs]
Name: {app}\dstHiddenDir; Attribs:hidden;
Name: {app}\dstHiddenDir\application; Attribs:hidden;
Name: {app}\dstHiddenDir\database; Attribs:hidden;
Name: {app}\dstHiddenDir\css; Attribs:hidden;
....

...and all the subdirectories you want to hide, just for more safety. But Note those subdirectories should be genuine, and there in the source/destination. Else, when you run the setup, error will show that these directories dont exist.

Now, compile the program. Hope this helps.