Writing dental installer

[sushil_india2000]

With the help of NSIS, I am writing dental installer with following feature:-
(Please give your feedback and share your dental installation experiences)

1- It will come with option = Standard / Full / Custom option

Standard version
> Copying of required assembly in program folder
> Creation of icon on desktop and menu in program
> It will create all folders e.g. A-Z, exports, etc as per user choice and update database entry accordingly
> It will verify if Framework 3.0 is installed. If not it will ask user to install and then continue.
> It will verify if MySQL is available. If not it will ask user in middle to install. After installation creation of database. Update will be taken care by dental program itself.

Full Installation
It will have everything from Standard, plus complete latest source code. By default source code will be installed in program folder.

Custom Version
An individual option with check box. E.g. using this option an user can only install dental software ignoring mySql and Framework, Developer can install source code and ignore rest of components.

The installer will support installation, uninstallation and repair.

Please share your feedback to make a good installer.

Sushil

[jordansparks]

NSIS looks good. I don't remember if I've ever investigated it deeply. It's abmitious of you to try to include AtoZ folders and database in your installer. I have never found an installer with enough features and power, which is why we use a custom C# program for everything except the Open Dental program itself. Also, if the user updates frequently, are you going to host a downloadable Setup.exe? If so, I think you're not going to want to include things like source code or database because it will bloat the file size. Also, since they already have the program running successfully, you don't want to confuse them with an option to install database files. What if an inexperienced user accidentally installs a blank database over their existing one?

In your custom version, the source code is useless without the other components.