Uninstaller Errors

Recently after changing the product name of one of the Merge modules in my suite I started getting errors while uninstallation.

When the uninstaller was called it threw a java exception saying target invocation exception stating



ZeroGu5: c:\program files\OpenSource\InstallFrameWork\Uninstaller\resource\iawin32.dll not found

at ZeroGa2.b(DashoA10*..)

at ZeroGa2.b(DashoA10*..)

at com.zerog.ia.installer.LifeCycleManager.b(DashoA10*..)

at com.zerog.ia.installer.LifeCycleManager.a(DashoA10*..)

at com.zerog.ia.installer.Main.main(DashoA10*..)

at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)

at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)

at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)

at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Unknown Source)

at com.zerog.lax.LAX.launch(DashoA10*..)

at com.zerog.lax.LAX.main(DashoA10*..)

Upon inspection I found that the resource folder that contains platform specific dll's under the uninstall folder. Even the global registry file that contains the file/folder installation was also found to be missing, so practically the uninstaller cannot work without this file.

Scratching my head for hours I build the installer with high debug enabled (jvm parameters -Dlax.debug.level=3 -Dlax.debug.all=true) with stderr and stdout directed to a file, but could not trace out any specific problem.

The installer archive contained all the resources that are required inside the uninstall folder, so there was no question that its a build issue.

Then I started the the dry run of the program my normalizing the payload to zero, modifying the project information properties and found that the product name had a trailing space at the end

Once the trailing space was removed the installation and uninstallation started working properly.

Although a is a kind of cosmetic defect but took hell lot of time to dig it out. Probably the Install Anywhere team forgot to check the product name property for any trailing spaces that can disrupt their XML transformation logic.