Can I select more than one component in the "Installation Designer"?

I am creating an installer for a 64 bit application that includes thousands of 3rd party DLLs (~2000)

According to InstallShield best practice, each DLL must be in a different component.

(from the doc) "Each component should contain only one portable executable file (an .exe, .dll, or .ocx file) or WinHelp file (.hlp file)."

So I have thousands of Components that I need to change the "64-bit component" property from "No" to "Yes".

The component wizard does not let me do this when I create the components.

Question: Is there a way to do a multi-selection of all the components to be able to change the property for all components at once ? or do I have to manually select each component and change the property ?

Note: I know that if 1 component is marked as 64-bit, then the installation will be "64-bit" aware.

Thanks.

Solution

There is no support for multi-selecting the components and editing them. However there are at least three workarounds with varying levels of ease.

Modify the Attributes column of the Component table in the Direct Editor. In the common case you will be replacing a series of components with the value 8 (msidbComponentAttributesSharedDllRefCount) with one that also includes 256 (msidbComponentAttributes64bit). If that is the case, you can just modify them in bulk to 264.
Use the automation interface property ISWiComponent.Attrib64BitComponent to modify your components by using a script.
In InstallShield 2016 or later, before creating the components, set MsiComponentAttributes in the InstallShield table to a value such as 264.

Note that before taking the time to modify all the components to be 64-bit, you should make sure that you need to do so. If these components only install a DLL to a 32-bit file location, and do not install registry keys to any 64-bit registry locations (that includes COM extraction; if you're using COM extraction on these files, they likely do have 64-bit registry keys and thus need to be 64-bit), there would be no need to mark them 64-bit.

Once you've confirmed you need to change them, note that if you've previously released the package with a 32-bit variant of the component, you also need to create a new GUID for the component, as part of following component rules.

Note as well that (as you mention) once you mark any component as 64-bit, you are required to mark your entire package as 64-bit, and it will no longer install on a 32-bit machine.