What is ADDDEFAULT property in msi?
Answers (4)
I have never used the ADDEFAULT property, nor do I recall having to do anything with it in a vendor MSI. I have had to use ADDLOCAL a few times. Especially with Business Objects, the have a CA that means no Features are installed with a silent install.
This pleasant description:
The value of the ADDDEFAULT property is a list of features delimited by commas that are to be installed in their default configuration. The features must be present in the Feature column of the Feature table. To install all features in their default configurations, use ADDDEFAULT=ALL on the command line.
A feature listed in the ADDDEFAULT property is installed in the same installation state as if the user had requested an installation-on-demand of the feature. The state is determined by which bits are set for the feature in the Attributes column of the Feature table, and which bits are set for the feature's components in the Attributes column of the Component table.
....seems to imply that the install on demand is used, I agree with VBScab, that is not good in an enterprise. I would have thought it would install the features listed but using the Local Source value from the feature table. That kind of makes sense BUT, the official word, seems to say that they will be installed on demand. I have never used that and as yet never seen a good reason for it.
Hope that helps
As you may know, each feature can have a default value to define where it should be "installed" to, Local, Source, etc.
These three properties allow you to override the individual feature setting.
I personally never use it via the command line, and use a packaging tool to customize the installation based on requirements (i.e. set the individual features to be installed locally or not). run from source is IMHO never an option for enterprise deployment.
Perhaps VBScab could also comment on this...