partial implementation of msi.dll

[Mike McCormack]

Hi Mike,

As far as I know, MSDN is it.  The code I posted was made by examining 
various .msi files.

Here's what I found (informal description of the MSI format):

****

An .msi file is an OLE structured store file.

Each table in the database is a single stream in the structured storage 
file. The stream names are mapped from the name of the table, using a 
simple 8bit <-> 6bit encoding, similar to base64 encoding.

Strings in the database are represented by an number, which is an offset 
into the string table.   The string can be determined using the streams 
_StringData and _StringPool.  The offset points to two 2 byte integers 
in _StringPool, one being the length of the string in bytes, and the 
other the number of occurences.  The string is found in _StringData by 
adding up all the previous lengths and generating an offset.

All general tables contain 2 or 4 byte numbers that are either offsets 
into the string table, or just integers.  The high bit of an integer 
value means that it is positive, not negative.

All the values in the first column are stored sequentially, followed by 
all the values in the second column, etc.  This means that row inserts 
cannot be performed without moving most of the data in a table... the 
MSI database format appears to be optimized for space, not speed.

The type of an field is defined by the "Type" field in the "_Tables" 
table.   It also defines the size of each column in the database, it's 
type, encoding (string/number) and whether it is a primary key or not.

If a stream is saved into a database field, it is stored as a normal 
stream in the structured storage file.  The encoding of the stream name 
is done such that it doesn't clash with table names.

****

I think the fields in the database are fairly well defined in MSDN, just 
not the actual structure of the database.

Mike


Mike Hearn wrote:
> Are there any documents describing the MSI file format/structures or is
> MSDN it?