MAKEMSI quickly and reliably creates MSI files in a non-programmatic way\Source CodeCommandsIcon

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The "Icon" Command

This command adds a file to the MSI "Icon" table.

The icon file should ideally only contains icons it should not be a large execuable which just happens to contain icons (see the "Icon Tools" section for more information).

The macro takes these parameters:

• Source File Name (positional)
  This is the source binary which is read to insert the icon. If required PPWIZARD will search for the file in its standard way.

  These files should be small (they increase the size of the installer and the installed footprint)! This is particularly the case if you are creating advertised icons as the whole point of it is that the installation gets delayed, for this reason this icon file would seldom if ever be the name of the executable file being used as a shortcut (if required the icon can be extracted to create a smaller file).

  For convenience I use normal windows ".ICO" files so that each icon can be easy updated without having an impact on the others. When using ".ICO" files the icon is refered to as icon number 0.

  See the "icon tools" section for icon editors and extractors.

• Key (optional)
  This is the Key which is used elsewhere to refer to this icon (generally by the "Shortcut" command). If not supplied then the short filename is extracted and used as the key (the case of the key exactly matches that of the file as supplied and of course you can only do this if the filename doesn't contain characters that are not valid in a Windows Installer "Identifier").

  In my experience when using ".ICO" files, the key must end in ".EXE" for shortcut icons to display them.

  If the "key" beings with "@" then what follows is not a key but an alias, a 'randomish" key will be generated for you and assigned to the alias (see below for more details).

  Due to OLE storage restritions this key is restricted to 57 characters..

• Product (optional)
  Is the icon to be the product icon which appears in the control panel's Add/Remove Applet (Y/N)? The default is of course "N". If "Y" then the "ARPPRODUCTICON" property is updated.

  Please also see the "COMPANY_PRODUCT_ICON" macro.

• Doco (optional)
  Should icon information is placed into the generated HTML report (Y/N)?

  The default for this parameter can be set via the DEFAULT_ICON_DOCO macro. The initial value for this is "Y".

• Comment (optional)
  This is a comment for the HTML doco. It overrides any other that may have been set by any enclosing "FileComment" block.

Icon Alias

Sometimes you will need to specify the exact key that needs to be used for an icon although this is likely to be rare.

All Windows versions have an icon caching bug which may prevent your new icon being displayed on a users computer if they had previously installed your product, a minor issue but a very annoying one. A workaround is to always use icons with different names and as windows installer uses the icons "key" when creating the file you need to vary the key.

The alias facility serves two purposes, you don't need to know what the key will be and a variable key can be produced to work around the windows icon bug.

The alias can be referred to with the "ICON" parameter of the "Shortcut" command. The alias is case sensitive but may include any character.

Windows Bugs

1. ARPPRODUCTICON #1
   There is a well known Windows Installer bug which can prevent the icon being displayed in the control panel's Add/Remove Applet. This occurs if an MSI was installed per-user (the MAKEMSI default is per-machine).

2. ARPPRODUCTICON #2
   If this property is not set at all then I have seen Windows Installer (on Windows XP) incorrectly grab the first entry in the "Icon" table and use it!

3. Icon Handling Caching
   By this I don't mean the well known problem Windows has always had simply caching icons (hence all the work arounds tools etc), what I mean here is that once an icon has been used such as "fred.ico" and you change "fred.ico", it can be very reluctant to pick up the new icon (seen/tested in Windows 95-2000).

   If you change the icons look and this does not get reflected in the installed product's shortcuts etc, you have two alternatives, rename the icon (use a different key - one way is to use a "alias" - see above) or put up with it (it will look OK when installed on clean machine).

4. Icon Bloat validation Message
   The validation warns where an icon exists which it doesn't believe is used by shortcuts etc. It reports this as it is just wasting space, however it doesn't recognise that its in use if its only used as a product icon.

5. Icon Table keys longer than 57 bytes corrupt the Database!

EXAMPLE

<$Icon "test.ico" Key="test.ico.exe">

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