Variable ODBC DSN name in InstallShield MSI instal

Question

I'm designing a new MSI installation for a product that allows multiple instances to be installed. Many of the components of the installation are identified by a 2-character code. Among these is an ODBC data source. The name of the data source includes this 2-character code, which is something the user enters during installation. I notice that I cannot use a property name "[MyPropertyName]" as the Name of an ODBC DSN in an InstallShield project. Is there any clean way to allow the ODBC DSN name to be set at runtime? If I were creating hard-wired names for each of my instances, I could create a separate DSN for each hardwired instance name ("Test" and "Production" for example), but we allow the user to specify the name. Am I going to run into more dead-ends as a result of this or is there a way to allow user-specified instance-specific property values?

Answer 1

You could either a) skip the ODBC tables in MSI and use the Registry table instead or b) use a custom action to dynamically inject custom rows at install time into the ODBC tables.