InstrallShield Basic MSI uninstall does not display a dialog with Finish button

Question

I used InstallShield 2018 and created a 'Basic MSI' project. When uninstalling the product, it confirms if I want to proceed with the uninstallation and once confirmed starts uninstalling. But then it simply vanishes without showing a dialog at the end where you can click on the Finish button.

As a result the user does not know if the uninstall is done or not or got aborted or something.

In my IS 2018 'InstallScript MSI' project the dialog with the Finish button is displayed at the end which is nice since the user knows the uninstall is done.

Please advise. thanks.

Answer 1

Basic UI Mode: When uninstall is invoked from the Add / Remove Applet (appwiz.cpl) it will run in basic GUI mode (UILevel = 3). This will skip the InstallUISequence in the MSI, and hence no setup wizard dialogs are shown, but rather just progress and error messages. More information on UILevel.

ARPNOREMOVE: As to what you can do about it. In the past I have set the ARPNOREMOVE Property to 1 in the property table in order to prevent the setup being removed using basic UI mode. Instead the user must click Modify in the ARP applet. This will ensure that the setup will run with full GUI, and you can invoke remove in turn from the Modify dialog that shows up (setup wizard dialog).

In older versions of Installshield, you could set this under General Information => Add / Remove Programs => Disable Remove Button => Yes. You can also go directly to the property table using the Direct Editor View - and you can use the Property Manager view as well. In all cases you assign a value of 1 to the ARPNOREMOVE property.

Custom Action: Some people add a custom action to show a setup uninstall completion dialog (or rather message box) directly from the InstallExecuteSequence, but this is very bad design. This sequence should feature no GUI elements at all in order to support silent installation / uninstallation properly.

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Silent Installation: I wrote an earlier answer on a slightly different aspect of silent installations a while back. Linking to it for more details on setup GUI: Uninstall from Control Panel is different from Remove from .msi.

Answer 2

thanks for the response and the detailed information Stein.

We have disabled the Change/Modify button in ARP. We only want to expose the 'Remove' button that allow users to only uninstall and not modify or repair.

So it seems it is not possible to see the Dialog with the Finish button or other UI dialogs since the InstallUISequence is skipped when using the Remove button?