In some cases, you may need to install Automated Build Studio with the desired settings on several computers. Automated Build Studio has an option to install it in silent mode, which helps in these cases. During this installation dialogs and messages are not displayed. All desired features that should be installed are specified in a special Windows Installer service transform (.mst) file. In order to create this file, you must have Orca as part of the Platform SDK installed on your computer. The following steps explain how you can create an .mst file and use it to perform a silent installation of Automated Build Studio.
To create an .mst file:
- Unpack Automated Build Studio’s installation package using WinRAR, which can be downloaded from
http://www.rarlab.com. You will get a set of installation files.
- Open the AutomatedQA Automated Build Studio.msi file using Orca. To do this:
- Launch Orca.exe.
- Select File|Open from the main menu of Orca.
- In the resulting Open dialog, browse for the AutomatedQA Automated Build Studio.msi file.
- Click Open to close the dialog.
The list of all tables in the AutomatedQA Automated Build Studio database will be displayed in the Tables window of Orca.
- Generate a new transform. To do this, select Transform | New Transform from the main menu of Orca:
- Select the Feature table in the Tables window. All components of this table will be displayed in the Table View window:
The Feature table allows you to specify which components of Automated Build Studio will be installed. The same components are displayed in the Custom Setup dialog when installing Automated Build Studio in the normal mode:
- In the Level column of the Table View window, you can set values that specify whether features will be installed on the local hard drive or not. The possible values are:
| 0 | The feature will not be available. |
| <150 | The component will be installed on local hard drive. |
| >150 | The component will be available, but will not be installed by default. |
Note that if the parent feature (for instance, the Plugins feature) has a level value that equals 0, all of its child features (Assistant, Charts_Panel, Client_Panel and Task_Sheduler) will not be available too. In this case, you should not set the level value for child components individually:
- If you don’t want to install Automated Build Studio to a default install directory, you can specify the desired directory. To do this, select the Properties table from the Tables window. In this table, you can create the INSTALLDIR property that will specify the path to the desired install directory. To create this property:
- Right-click anywhere in the Table View window and select Add Row from the context menu. The Add Row dialog will appear:
- In the dialog, specify the property name (INSTALLDIR) and the path to the desired install directory.
- Click OK to close the dialog. The INSTALLDIR property will appear in the Properties table.
In the same way you can also specify other properties in the Properties table, for instance, the user name (USERNAME) and the company name (COMPANYNAME).
- After specifying the components’ levels and other properties, you can save the transform file. To do this, select Transform | Generate Transform from main menu of Orca. The Save Transform As dialog will appear.
- In the dialog, specify the transform file name and click Save.
- Close the Orca application.
Now you can run the silent installation:
The installation will be performed with the settings that you specified in the .mst file. The features whose levels are set to 0 will not be installed. To install them later, you must create a new transform file. The features whose levels are bigger than 150 will not be installed, but you can install them at any time. To do this, use the following command line:
msiexec.exe /i "AutomatedQA Automated build studio.msi" INSTALLLEVEL=value /q
In the INSTALLLEVEL argument, you can specify the level value of the features that will be installed in addition to previously installed components. Thus, during creating the .mst file you can specify special level values for the components that may be installed later. For instance, by default, the level of the WebInterface and TFServerExtension features is set to 200. These components will not be installed during the silent installation using the .mst file. But you can install them later, using the following command line:
msiexec.exe /i "AutomatedQA Automated build studio.msi" INSTALLLEVEL=200 /q
We hope this tip helps you when installing Automated Build Studio in silent mode. If you haven’t tried Automated Build Studio, download and try it today.