win32utils devel - May 2008 - Interest in win32-installer

I was wondering if people would be interested in wrapping msi.dll
functionality,

I''ve started writing a small library to enable enumeration of products
installed via Windows Installer using win32api (I know I can also
query via win32ole to win32_product but I don''t seem to get all the
properties that are in msi.h).

It''s a little messy, and I''ve not got far as I''m
pretty new at ruby
and win32 programming coming from mostly a python/*nix background, so
I thought I''d try to get some early feedback. It''s inspired by
psmsi
(http://www.codeplex.com/psmsi/) but I want to be able to get
installer information (and eventually information from an msi) in ruby
as it''d help towards getting a windows installer puppet package
provider.

I''m trying to think how best to test the code - based upon looking at
the tests in psmsi I was wondering if there is a ruby library that
would allow me to set up temporary keys in the registry so I can
actually set expectations/assertions on known values for installed
software - this should be possible by abusing RegOverridePredefKey.

Any feedback, and advice - particularly about producing ruby idiom
friendly library welcome.

Paul
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: win32utils-devel-bounces at rubyforge.org 
> [mailto:win32utils-devel-bounces at rubyforge.org] On Behalf Of 
> Paul Nasrat
> Sent: Monday, May 26, 2008 10:37 AM
> To: win32utils-devel at rubyforge.org
> Subject: [Win32utils-devel] Interest in win32-installer
> 
> I was wondering if people would be interested in wrapping 
> msi.dll functionality,
> 
> I''ve started writing a small library to enable enumeration of 
> products installed via Windows Installer using win32api (I 
> know I can also query via win32ole to win32_product but I 
> don''t seem to get all the properties that are in msi.h).
I''m curious which properties you don''t get. I did notice that
there are
actually a few product related WMI classes.
 
> It''s a little messy, and I''ve not got far as I''m
pretty new
> at ruby and win32 programming coming from mostly a 
> python/*nix background, so I thought I''d try to get some 
> early feedback. It''s inspired by psmsi
> (http://www.codeplex.com/psmsi/) but I want to be able to get 
> installer information (and eventually information from an 
> msi) in ruby as it''d help towards getting a windows installer 
> puppet package provider.
If you want to use the Windows API directly, you could wrap the MSI
functions you need and call them. For example:

# Warning: untested code
require ''win32/api''
include Win32

MsiGetProductInfo = API.new(''MsiGetProductInfo'',
''PPPP'', ''I'', ''msi)

buf = 0.chr * 512 # Or whatever you need, depending on the property
buf_val = [buf.size].pack(''L'')

MsiGetProductInfo.call(some_product, some_property, buf, buf_val)
> I''m trying to think how best to test the code - based upon 
> looking at the tests in psmsi I was wondering if there is a 
> ruby library that would allow me to set up temporary keys in 
> the registry so I can actually set expectations/assertions on 
> known values for installed software - this should be possible 
> by abusing RegOverridePredefKey.
Ruby comes with a win32-registry library. I think you could use that.

Regards,

Dan 


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