best way to register file with non-standard extension

[Alan Ambrose]

Hi,

I have an in-house developed dll which has the special extension 'xll'. It contains both a special interface for Excel (hence the name) and also a com interface. We can't really change the extension because Excel recognises it as a special dll.

Problem is that ISE doesn't allow me to specify what kind of registration I want because the dll doesn't have a dll or ocx extension - and I get no registration.

What's the best way of telling ISE to register it for me. I have included a regsvr32 step, but that's a bit clunky because I get a 'registered OK' dialog from regsvr32. I can see references to SWDEPEND.INI in other posts but a search of the ISE online help doesn't find anything for this. I have included the OLESelfRegister tag in the version info but that doean't seem to help.

Alan

[Chandima]

We realize this as a limitation of Express and taking steps to fix it in Express 3.54 (I actually saw the solution in todays build!).

You could do this by manually modifying the msi file uinsg a tool like ORCA. You can download the Windows Installer SDK (which contains ORCA) from http://download.microsoft.com/msdownload/platformsdk/i386/InstallerSamples/IntelSDK.msi

Once you have ORCA installed:
1. Open the msi in ORCA
2. Go to the File Table
3. Locate the line that corresponds to your xll file
4. Copy the value in the first column of this row (File column)
5. Go to SelfReg Table
6. Add a new Row
7. Paste the value you copied in step 4 in the "File_" column and enter 1 in the "Cost" column
8. Save the msi and run the setup

This should tell the Windows Installer to register this file. I don't know whether it actually does any validation to see if the file it's trying to register is strictly a dll or ocx but it's worth a try. Technically, it should work.

[Alan Ambrose]

Hi Chandima,

That makes sense, and BTW it works fine. Is there a way to create the setup.exe package from the .msi file manually?

Alan

[Chandima]

I'm afraid you will have to use something like Package For The Web (free download from our website) to create a self extracting Exe out of this msi again.