Itty Bitty Rants

Infrequent posts about stuff.

Environment and Path Variables in InstallShield

For whatever reason I have either never had a reason to use an Environment Variable for a Path Variable in InstallShield before now, or it’s been long enough that I forgot how to do it so this morning when I went in to try and set one up I was a bit surprised to find it to not be quite as straightforward as I thought it might be.

I had originally just gone straight to the Path Variables section of the IDE [EDIT: after creating the environment variable before starting InstallShield] and created a new Path Variable entry and changed the type to “Environment” however no matter what I did I could not get it to resolve to the value of the Environment Variable that I had already created. The help files were no help and I didn’t see anything in a quick search on the InstallShield Community Forums (which are normally a great resource for exactly this sort of problem). I had been using InstallShield 2009 Professional and verified that it worked the same ways in 2010 and 2011. Eventually I stumbled on to this method:

If someone knows of an easier way of doing this I’d love to hear about it!