combining multiple msi installer into single installer

Question

In My application there are 4 msi installers.one which installs web project,other one installs web services and two installers for installing windows service.

I want to combine all 4 into one.Is there a way to do that without using wix,installshield or any third party products.

Answer 1

A simple approach is to add 3 of your installers as a prerequisite to the fourth one. You can read more about prerequisites here:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/77z6b8tz(VS.80).aspx
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165429.aspx
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165429(VS.80).aspx

You can then add the EXE bootstrapper and MSI files into a single EXE self-extract archive which executes the bootstrapper when extracted.

If an EXE is not acceptable and you want to combine them in an MSI, you will need a third party setup authoring tool.

Answer 2

No, there's no way to combine 4 MSIs into a single one. Whilst there are some ways of compositing components together (see Merge Modules, but they're not that popular these days), these have to be specially constructed, and are consumed whilst constructing the MSI into which they're added.