Determining the Appropriate Method for Incorporating DIMs in Installation Projects

InstallShield 2018

Project • This information applies to Basic MSI projects.

A developer installation manifest (DIM) is a feature-sized collection of related items such as product files, shortcuts, registry entries, text file changes, IIS Web sites, and other elements that together make up a discrete portion of a product installation. Once you have created a DIM, you can add it to a Basic MSI project in one of two ways:

By reference—You can add a reference for a DIM project to your Basic MSI project. With this method, the DIM elements are merged into the Basic MSI project at build time. Each time that you build the Basic MSI installation, InstallShield references the latest version of the DIM project and includes it in the installation that it generates.

Using DIM references in Basic MSI projects enables multiple software developers to contribute to the development of the installation simultaneously. Each software developer can work on a separate DIM that the release engineer can reference in one or more installation projects.

If you want to modify any portion of a DIM project, open the DIM project in InstallShield, make the required changes, and then rebuild any Basic MSI projects that reference that DIM.

This method is the more commonly performed method.

To learn more, see Referencing a DIM in a Project.

By import—You can import a DIM project into your Basic MSI project. This method is a one-time, irreversible import that merges the DIM data into the Basic MSI project at design time.

Any further changes that need to be made to the DIM data are made from within the Basic MSI project. Modifying the original DIM project does not modify the corresponding data in the Basic MSI project.

You may want to import a DIM project to troubleshoot problems with a product or its installation. When you are importing a DIM project, you have the option to back up your Basic MSI project (.ism) before the import; this option enables you to revert back to the base Basic MSI project without the imported DIM project.

To learn more, see Importing a DIM into a Project.

DIM projects enables developers and release engineers to reuse functional portions of an installation efficiently.

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