A client has an intranet LOB web app that they deploy to their clients’ servers. With the latest update to their application, they want to use wants to use InstallShield 2012 to streamline the upgrade process. The install should replace the existing version with the new files in the installer. Their clients have often changed the physical location of the website to something other than inetpub, so they want to read that physical path from IIS and install wherever it indicates.
How can we pull the physical path location of a web application (with a known name) from IIS and use that for the installation?
The only solution I can think of is a custom action. Basically, you use custom code to retrieve the old path and save it in an installer property. This property can then be used in your installer.
Please note that only custom actions which receive the installation handle can set installer properties. So you can try creating a win32 DLL or VBScript custom action.