Is there any help and advice on installation on systems where the main development account doe not have admin permission? Over the years I have always had a general account with admin permission. Unfortunately now in line with many companies I am not being given that option. I have a temporary local admin account I can use to elevate, but will only have that for about a month.
Most other software I have installed has ben OK, but I have just run in to issues with my first TMS install (always FlexCel, as it is great).
After the installation it reported not being abke to find quite a few files. On looking at the log in the final window it is clear most of those would be located in for the admin account and not my main account. On restarting Delphi, obviously the packages are not loaded. I am wondering if there is a better sequence.
I think I ran the TMS subscription manager as Admin (maybe this is the problem, as maybe it took the account from there when it kicked off the Flexcel installer. However when the installer started up, it also required me to provide elevation, so maybe that is where it picked up the account. Either way when I revert back to my main account I will not have access to any files in c:\users<someAdminAccountName>\Documents.
I can't believe I am the only person to have to run this way (or even the first). So any advice would be gratefully accepted. I am going to hold off trying to install other TMS packages I have licensed until I understand this.
Hi,
Our current installers require admin rights indeed. That's the default for a Windows install, and what most users have. And I know it sounds strange, but while you are not the first, I think I can count in 2 hands the number of issues with this in more than 20 years developing FlexCel and many tens of thousands of customers. Yes, it is a rare thing
And at least in FlexCel case, the only thing we use admin rights for is to create symbolic links, and you don't need those rights if you are in "dev mode" (see the first answer here: batch file - Allow mklink for a non-admin user - Stack Overflow ), so that might be another reason we don't see this issue often. If you have dev mode enabled, the setup should run without admin.
But we are indeed aware of users who don't get admin rights, and that was one of the reasons we developed a completely new system, which, among other things, doesn't require admin rights at all (it took a lot of effort and internal discussions to get completely rid of admin requirements) . See TMS Software | Blog
So my advise if you require admin rights, at least for the products that are currently supported (and FlexCel is one of those), just use tms smart setup. While labeled "beta" It is very stable right now, it doesn't require admin rights, it is much faster, and it can install everything in a single command. Myself, I can't see me going back to using the old installers for any product which is already in smart setup. And it is the future for all our installers, setups.exe are going to be slowly deprecated.
There is a link to download it in this post:
Completely uninstall FlexCel (so we don't have repeated things in the disk), then open a console, and in a folder where you have full access as non-admin, type tms install tms.flexcel.vcl and that's it.
Thanks as always for the swift response. One of the reasons I love FlexCel (beyond the fact it just works, and is faster than a politcian changing their mind when they think it is to their advantage..)
I think you will find it is going to become more and more frequest, so I am glad it looks like there is a solution. I will give this a try a little later (I have to work out how to get the partial Flexcel off the system, since it will only manifest when using the local admin account). Once I have that I will give it a try, and then hopefully the other TMS components I use.
I am really interested in knowing how it goes, and if you don't run into any issues with your configuration. Setup is a complex thing due to all the variations in configurations, so we want to make sure we make it right for everyone. A silly example: To get rid of the "admin rights" needed to create symbolic links (which honestly is nonsense, and you don't need them in unix, but that's how it is), we moved them to hard links. And then we got this issue: Could not create hard link - request is not supported - #2 by adrian
It is a hard fight... but we try
I truly appreciate all you do. I know many (though not all) of the pitfalls. Unfortunately being in a more corporate environment, rather than a software house, the comfort level of the upper management forces some decisions that make no sense to me. But long ago I took the decision (which I don't regret) to stay in development rather than become a manager.
I will et you know how it goes. I have already turned on Dev mode (while I have the local admin account to allow it). I am also looking at maybe setting up a dev drive. It seems to me that both of these are admissions by MS that they have not really got things right for people in our situation.
I did run in to one issue (this is not t do with FlexCel, but the installer when I was doing the VCL UI Pack). I had a project that uses The WebUpdate components. It would not build complaining that it could not find wulangauages.pas, altough it seemed able to find other units from he same component. In the end I had to manually add to the library path. The image shows the path one path added by the installer and the one I had to add after it.
Perhaps you could pass this on to the relevant person @adrian .
