Tuesday, September 05, 2006

MSI Installer - Selecting the Everyone option in the Select Installation Folder dialog

When running an installer, the dialog "Select Installation Folder", has an option for installing the application for either "Everyone" or "Just for you". And "Just me" is the option selected by default. Recently for one of our applications, we wanted it to default to "Everyone". Turns out that changing the default option cannot be done through the Installer solution. You need Microsoft's MSI editor tool "ORCA". Here is what you need to do: Install ORCA. After which if you right click on an MSI file, you get the option: "Edit with Orca". Select it, to open the MSI in ORCA. The MSI file is basically a specialized database, and ORCA allows you to edit it. To change the default to everyone, navigate to the table "Property". Change the value for the entry FolderForm_AllUsers from "Me" to "ALL". And thats it. Fire up your installer, and it should automatically default to the "Everyone" option.

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