Summary

Symptoms

When building a InstallShield project, the following error may occur:

"ISDEV : error -4072: Error retrieving dependency [1] of [2]"

This error may also appear in the following syntax:

"ISDEV : error -4072: Error retrieving the dependencies for [2]"

[1] is a placeholder that contains the specific dependent file that cannot be added, while [2] contains the merge module name that has this dependency.

Cause

This error occurs when a merge module is included in the project, and this merge module contains dependencies to other merge modules that cannot be found on the build machine. This has been known to occur with third-party merge modules, such as Crystal Reports, MSDE 2000, and the Borland Database Engine (BDE).

Many of these third-party merge modules depend on other merge modules to be included in the project to work properly. For example, Crystal Decisions released several merge modules to support Crystal Reports 9. Many of these merge modules have dependencies on each other, and therefore, you need to include several of them to properly install Crystal Reports 9 support on the target system. If you only include one of these Crystal Reports merge modules in your project, and the others are not present on the machine, this error may occur.

These dependencies exist because the merge module author created them to have this requirement.

Resolution

To resolve this behavior, make sure the specific dependency referenced in the error message is present on the build machine and is displayed in the Redistributables view within the InstallShield IDE. If this dependency cannot be located, note the merge module that contained this dependency in the error message. If it is a third-party merge module, contact the company that authored the merge module for details on how to acquire this dependency.

If you wish to obtain a list of all dependencies a given merge module may contain, follow these steps:

1. Locate the merge module (.MSM file) on the build machine that you would like to research.

2. Open this MSM file directly in InstallShield, and choose to open it in Direct Edit mode.

3. If the merge module contains a ModuleDependency table, review the contents of the table.

The third column (RequiredID) within this table contains the name of the dependent merge module. Make sure that all merge modules listed in this table are present on your build machine.

If this merge module does not contain a ModuleDependency table, no dependencies exist for this module.