Note: This post was recently updated for EViews 14, but the instructions also work for other versions of EViews. Simply replace the name of the EViews 14 installer below with the correct installer name for your version.
Performing a silent installation
We currently don't provide an MSI installer, only an EXE. So to perform a silent installation, you'll have to first generate a recorded "script" file by installing EViews onto a target machine once. To generate the script, run our EXE installer with these parameters:
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"EViews14Installer.exe" -r -f1"c:\files\script.iss"
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"EViews14Installer.exe" -s -f1"c:\files\script.iss"
EViews Licensing Issues with silent installs
Typically, our installers ask for an EViews serial number during installation in order to know how to setup EViews licensing properly on the target machine. This means that this serial number will be "recorded" into the installer script if you are in record mode. This is ideal for those of you that purchased a concurrent or an unlimited lab license because all of your users will share the single serial number (typically registered on a local EViews License server).
However, for standalone license users where each user has a different serial number, doing a silent install requires a few more steps. When EViews runs for the first time after an install, if a standalone license was entered during the installation, EViews will automatically pre-fill this serial number into the Registration dialog that appears. This is done for convenience so that our typical user does not have enter the serial number twice. But if you wish to perform multiple silent installs each with a different serial number, you will want to prevent EViews from remembering the serial number entered during installation. To do this, we provide a special checkbox on the installer dialog that asks for the serial number: (this checkbox only appears when the installer is running in RECORD mode)
During the recording, make sure to UNCHECK this checkbox and proceed with the installation. Now when EViews is run for the first time on the target machine, it will not pre-fill in the serial number on the Registration dialog. This requires the user to manually enter his/her own serial number, which you can provide via an email or however you wish.
Troubleshooting Silent Install Problems
If you run into problems with the silent install method, here are a few things to check for:
1. Make sure your target client does not already have EViews installed on it. If so, our installer runs in uninstall mode.
2. Make sure your target client machine during the silent install has the same OS version as the recording machine. Also, if the target machine is a VM, make sure you recorded the install script on a similar VM and not a physical machine.
3. Make sure the silent installation is performed with elevated admin rights, otherwise, our installer won't be able to write to any protected directories, such as the "Program Files" directory.
4. Make sure you're EViews license is valid for the target system. For example, a DEMO license might work to record on a physical (non-vm) machine, but it won't work on a target VM client. Also, no single-user license will work on a Windows Server OS.
Next, verify that a manual installation of EViews on the target client works. If so, re-record the install script on that target and then compare the two install scripts to look for differences. Any differences between the two scripts could be clues as to why the initial script failed.
Turn on our installer verbose mode and specify a specific output log file by running the script with these parameters:
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"EViews14Installer.exe" -s -f1"c:\files\script.iss" -f2"c:\files\log.txt" -verbose
Silent EViews Serial Registration for Standalone\Single-User licenses
If you installed EViews using a standalone\single-user license, the user will have to register their serial number the first time they run EViews. To prevent this, you could take an extra step and perform the serial registration for them beforehand (for EViews 8 and newer versions only). We provide a way to register a serial number using command line parameters. To silently register a serial number, call the EViews executable like this:
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EViews14.exe /registerlicense "XXXXXXXX - XXXXXXXX - XXXXXXXX" "Name"
Running this on the target machine will register the serial number and "tie" it to that machine.
EViews should now fully installed and registered.
Steve