Not You Again
InstallShield rears its ugly head once again. There’s a new version of one of our products, so of course I have to go back and update all the version numbers, filenames, etc…
That’s easy enough, except that when I went to save all the changes and export them back to text files for source control, I got the dreaded “87: Error in exporting tables” message. I had run into this error on Server 2003, but everything had been fine when I did changes under XP. Except that apparently XP SP2 broke InstallShield 8. Sigh…
Fortunately there’s a workaround using a tool called ORCA from Microsoft. All I had to do was load the InstallShield project in ORCA, delete a table that’s causing the problem, and resave the project. Except that when I tried to select the table, ORCA crashed…
AAAAAAUGGGHHH.
ORCA? No wonder it crashed, what with you trying to shove a whale into a computer already bloated with Windows. That’s just *silly*… ;-)
Comment by Pimp Daddy P — 10/14/2004 @ 10:54 am
Apparently ORCA doesn’t work on XP SP2 or Server 2003 either, so InstallShield’s own advice turned out to be pretty useless. I wound up having to load up a VMWare instance with XP SP1 on a coworker’s system, doing the editing there, and then copying it back to my own systems. Wheee.
Comment by heide — 10/14/2004 @ 1:05 pm
That’s even sillier than the whale comment… Isn’t MS interested in addressing this?
Comment by Pimp Daddy P — 10/14/2004 @ 8:45 pm
Unlikely, since the whole problem was that InstallShield was generating technically-invalid tables in the first place, it’s fixed in more recent versions (but upgrading isn’t trivial), and ORCA is just a little convenience utility from an SDK, not a full-fledge high-priority app.
Comment by heide — 10/14/2004 @ 9:20 pm