jean-francois.fourn1.5524908181322969E12 asked a question.
Project file corrupted!
Yesterday, I worked with InstallShield (2010) on a basic msi project. When I opened my project this morning, a strange thing happened. My project was not opening. InstallShield had frozen at the splash screen and nothing was happening. I ended up killing isdev.exe from the task manager. After that, when double-clicking the file, I had the error message "InstallShield cannot open %FILE%. Please contact Acresso technical support for more information." (with %FILE% pointing to my file).
I started InstallShield and opened the file from the InstallShield IDE. Got the same error message, however, in the "Results" window, I could see: "Unsupported datatype. Failed to create the project file in binary format. Location: table 'Binary', row 1, column 2".
By chance, my project was saved in XML format (or I would have lost everyhthing). I founded that the error was being caused by two extras return line characters in the xml. The line causing the problem was:
DLLWRAP.DLL
<ISProductFolder>\redist\language independent\i386\dllwrap.dll
By removing the two return lines characters between the and the , the project opened correctly.
It is easy to reproduce this problem by editing any XML-formatted project file to replace a "" by "\n". What leaded InstallShield to do it itself is unclear.
What I can tell about this is that this particular line was indeed special. What I did was that I imported some custom action and some dialogs from another project. There was some conflicts of course which I resolved. When I tried to build, I had an error saying the file "dllwrap.dll" was missing in the binary table. So I added it manually by looking at another InstallShield project. Not sure why my project XML was saved like that, but I sure thought I lost all my work.
Hope this can fixed eventually and that it will help anyone encountering the same problem.
Even the attributes dt:dt="bin.base64" md5="d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e" in the XML "table cell" for the "Data" column of the Binary table do not seem to be in order here. They are exactly the same regardless which file I add, so it has nothing ot do with an MD5 hash of the actual file, and entries that InstallShield automatically adds to the Binary table do not have these attributes. If I delete not only the line breaks, but also these attributes, these files are perfectly streamed into the Binary table.
So adding a file to the Binary table in the Direct Editor corrupts the project file, if saved as XML.
I think this is a clear bug; however I have not found any document in the knowledge base concerning this issue yet.
Regards
Matthias