Using a silent install for deployment

Silent installs run without user input and with no indication to the user that an install is occurring. On Windows operating systems, you can call the SQL Anywhere installer from your own install program in such a way that the SQL Anywhere install is silent.

The options for the SQL Anywhere install program setup.exe are:

/L:language_id The language identifier is a locale number that represents the language for the install. For example, locale ID 1033 identifies U.S. English, locale ID 1031 identifies German, locale ID 1036 identifies French, locale ID 1041 identifies Japanese, and locale ID 2052 identifies Simplified Chinese.
/S This option hides the initialization dialogue. Use this option in conjunction with /V.
/V Specify parameters to MSIEXEC, the Microsoft Windows Installer tool.

The following command line example assumes that the install image directory is in the software\sqlanywhere directory on the CD in drive d:.

d:\software\sqlanywhere\setup.exe /l:1033 /s "/v:/qn 
    REGKEY=PEPEV-E96QE-A4000-00000-00000 INSTALLDIR=c:\sa11 DIR_SAMPLES=c:\sa11\Samples"

REGKEY The value of this parameter must be a valid software installation key.
INSTALLDIR The value of this parameter is the path to where the software is installed.
DIR_SAMPLES The value of this parameter is the path to where the sample programs are installed.
USERNAME The value of this parameter is the user name to record for this installation (for example, USERNAME=\"John Smith\").
COMPANYNAME The value of this parameter is the company name to record for this installation (for example, COMPANYNAME=\"Smith Holdings\").

An example of a command line that specifies all of the above options is:

d:\software\sqlanywhere\setup.exe /l:1033 /s "/v:/qn 
    REGKEY=PEPEV-E96QE-A4000-00000-00000 
    INSTALLDIR=c:\sa11 
    DIR_SAMPLES=c:\sa11\Samples"
    USERNAME=\"John Smith\"
    COMPANYNAME=\"Smith Holdings\"

Although the above text is shown over several lines for reasons of length, it would be specified as a single line of text. Note the use of the backslash character to escape the interior quotation marks.

In addition to a silent install, it is also possible to perform a silent uninstall. The following is an example of a command line that would do this.

msiexec.exe /qn /uninstall {ECE263B0-6C8B-404C-B4AC-8FAB1C87AB4A}

In the above example, you call the Microsoft Windows Installer tool directly.

/qn This parameter tells the Microsoft Windows Installer to operate in the background with no user interaction.
/uninstall <product-code> This parameter tells the Microsoft Windows Installer to uninstall the product associated with the specified product code.

The silent install described above does not address how you would select a subset of the components to install. This topic is better addressed by the Deployment Wizard. For information on component selection, see Using the Deployment Wizard.

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