Add custom action of installing msi before the setup in installer project

Question

I am creating an installer project for one of my windows applications .

I want to make sure that an msi is installed first i.e. before the primary output is installed . The msi in question here is Microsoft VisualFoxPro OLEDB .

So if I tried adding custom action as

So if I change the file type to all files and try adding the msi , it gives an error saying

Not a valid file type for custom action

Is there any other way to do what I am trying to achieve here?

Answer 1

All Visual Studio custom actions run after all the files have been installed, so you cannot use a custom action to install another MSI before your primary output is installed. Also, running an MSI-based install from a custom action is likely to fail because concurrent MSI-based installs are not allowed.

The normal way to do this is to create a bootstrapper package that installs dependencies before your MSI is installed, start here:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165429.aspx

Answer 2

I found an associated article that i have used previously to package a dependency (which i did not want in the pre-requisites) on codeproject