C.A.T4 Manager Silent Installer 6.14.1 supports silent installation. Silent installation is the process of being able to install, upgrade software without the requirement of user interaction. This can be useful should installation or updates need to occur automatically following, for example, the internal distribution of a new setup.exe for CAT4 Manager on a company network.
How Silent Installation Works
Silent installation occurs by the command-line invocation of the setup.exe file with the appropriate iss file passed to it. An iss file is essentially a file containing instructions on how to proceed through the expected installation wizard automatically.
Based upon whether the CAT4 Manager software is already installed and whether the version to be installed is a greater version than that of the one already installed or not, a different wizard will appear when the setup.exe is invoked; therefore 3 different iss files to cover each scenario have been included in the latest installer package available from the Radiodetection website.
Note that one scenario currently unsupported is for running the setup.exe whilst the Manager software is already running – in this scenario it is the user’s responsibility to ensure that none of the Manager exes are running prior to attempting a silent installation.
Invoking the Silent Installation
In order to ease the process of silent installation, an additional exe named “CAT4 Manager Silent Installer.exe” has been provided. This exe will determine which iss file needs to be passed to the setup.exe to perform a successful silent installation. This means that all that needs to be done to invoke the silent installation is to run the “CAT4 Manager Silent Installer.exe” from a directory containing the other bundled assets (as follows):
- Install.iss
- Upgrade.iss
- Setup.iss
If the silent installation fails, a setup.log file will be generated in this directory containing the error code indicating why it failed. If the silent installation succeeded, one can confirm this by verifying that the installed version of “CAT4 Manager” listed under “Programs and Features” matches the version of the setup.exe (accessible via its “Properties” → “Details” → “File version” or “Product version”).
Custom Silent Installation Invocation
If “CAT4 Manager Silent Installer.exe” does not meet your needs, users can generate their own iss file from the setup.exe by running it at command-line as follows:
setup.exe /r /f1”.\My Custom ISS File.iss”
This will run the setup.exe wizard as normal, recording all user interactions into “My Custom ISS File.iss” in the current directory.
You can then use that iss file in a similar way to which “CAT4 Manager Silent Installer.exe” uses the 3 provided iss files.
setup.exe /s /f1”My Custom ISS File.iss”
If this silent installation fails, a setup.log file containing the error code will be generated in the current directory.
It is possible to create a batch file or your own executable file to incorporate conditional logic to determine which ISS file needs to be ran with the setup.exe depending upon the state of the target machine.