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*… ;-)
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.
That’s even sillier than the whale comment… Isn’t MS interested in addressing this?
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.