How does Directory Opus extract the “Product Version” from .msi files?

Help & Support
1

How does Directory Opus extract the Product Version out of .msi files? I am trying to help David Carpenter, the creator of the Everything Search Engine, figure out how to enable Everything to extract Product Version numbers.

I noticed that when you look at an .msi file's Properties > Details page, there is not an actual human readable number shown. There is, however, a Revision number, followed by a series of characters, for example, {AEF703DD-B958-4B33-804B-7B0685DD0356} → Is this character string the Product Version, but encoded? Is there an API used to extract the Product Version? Thanks for your help.

2

MSI files have an internal database, and you can use the msiquery API to query it using SQL. Below is a version of the code we use:

bool GetMsiProperties(LPCWSTR pszFile, std::map<std::wstring, std::wstring>& mapProps)
{
	MSIHANDLE hMsi{};
	if (FAILED(MsiOpenDatabaseW(pszFile, MSIDBOPEN_READONLY, &hMsi)))
		return false;

	bool fGotOne{};
	for (auto& prop : mapProps)
	{
		MSIHANDLE hQuery;
		if (SUCCEEDED(MsiDatabaseOpenView(hMsi,
			(std::wstring(L"Select Value from Property where Property = '") + prop.first + L"'").c_str(), &hQuery)))
		{
			if (SUCCEEDED(MsiViewExecute(hQuery, 0)))
			{
				MSIHANDLE hRecord;
				if (SUCCEEDED(MsiViewFetch(hQuery, &hRecord)))
				{
					wchar_t wchBuf[512]{};
					DWORD dwLen = _countof(wchBuf);
					if (SUCCEEDED(MsiRecordGetString(hRecord, 1, wchBuf, &dwLen)))
					{
						prop.second = wchBuf;
						fGotOne = true;
					}
					MsiCloseHandle(hRecord);
				}
				MsiViewClose(hQuery);
			}
			MsiCloseHandle(hQuery);
		}
	}

	MsiCloseHandle(hMsi);
	return fGotOne;
}

// use the above function like this:
std::map<std::wstring, std::wstring> mapProps {
	{ L"ProductName", {} },
	{ L"ProductVersion", {} },
	{ L"Manufacturer", {} }
};

bool fGotProps = GetMsiProperties(lpSourcePath->GetString(), mapProps);
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3

Thank you so much! I will pass this along to David (aka @void)

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4

Jon, David Carpenter, the creator of Everything, says Thank you for the source code snippet that allows Directory Opus to extract metadata from *.msi files. He says your code enabled him to add support for *.msi files in Everything. Thank you for sharing your code.

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