从Setup.exe引导程序调用时如何确定MSI的返回码

Question

We have a Win Forms application that is built from VS 2010, and has a VS Setup project which creates an MSI and a Setup.exe as the bootstrapper.

The MSI is included in a self-extracting 7zip file that calls a batch file when it extracts, and that batch file in the past would execute the MSI directly with the /passive switch, and it would give different messages depending on the return code, like shown below...

IF %ErrorLevel% EQU 1602 GOTO :INSTALL_CANCELLED
IF %ErrorLevel% NEQ 0 GOTO :INSTALL_FAILED

Executing the MSI directly means that the bootstrap process is skipped and prerequisites don't get installed if they are needed. So I want to change this so that we include the Setup.exe bootstrapper in the package, and execute Setup.exe /passive instead of calling the MSI directly.

This works fine, unless something goes wrong, in which case the %ErrorLevel% is still returned as 0. I'm assuming this is because Setup.exe calls the MSI, and regardless of whether the MSI hit an error or not, the Setup.exe exits with return code of 0.

Is there any way to detect whether the MSI returns a non-zero code if I'm calling Setup.exe instead of calling the MSI directly?

*EDIT

I found this MSDN article, which says the following...

Note that the Setup.exe Bootstrapper sample does not need to check for error codes generated by the host application, myapp, because this is not a silent install and all errors are displayed to the user through the Windows Installer user interface.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xhz1cfs8(v=vs.90).aspx#cpconsetupexebootstrappersampleoperationsanchor4

WTF do they mean "Because this is not a silent install"? The hell it isn't. They support passing the /passive switch to make it a silent install, but then they give you no way to get a return code from the MSI, in their words "because this is not a silent install".

Well now I'm just ranting about a deprecated Visual Studio feature, so I guess it is what it is.

Answer 1

The setup.exe would have to surface the exit code.

FWIW, Windows Installer XML (WiX) has a bootstrapper (Burn) that you can customize (implementing a bootstrapper application layer) and do anything you want to do.

Answer 2

Edit: I misread the question; I thought you were running someone else's setup project. However, since this answer might still be useful to someone, and I've already written it, I'm posting it anyway.

Not easily, and not from batch.

If you launch the setup process within a job object you can assign it to a completion port and listen for the JOB_OBJECT_MSG_NEW_PROCESS message. You would then have to open the new process, check whether it is msiexec.exe and keep the process handle if so.

When the setup process is finished, use the stored process handle for msiexec.exe to retrieve the exit code via GetExitCodeProcess() .