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cbarlow
Level 7

Chained MSIs in a Patch

Can someone tell me how chained MSI's work with a patch. If my chained MSI has changed, I would like to make sure it is included as part of the patch, but I don't see how I can do this. Does anyone have an idea?

Clark
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MichaelU
Level 12 Flexeran
Level 12 Flexeran

We don't currently offer a clean way of handling this, so I suggest only using chaining only at the major upgrade level. Individual patches can target any given MSI that's already on the installed on the system, and don't require a customer to find the target or even know it's installed.

If you're asking about building rather than applying them, then it's just a matter of updating your chained MSIs in their own projects, then including the updates in your outer installer. Unfortunately we only support .msi files and not .msp files, so applying patches with our chaining support is not feasible at this time. The feature request for supporting patches is being tracked under IOC-000079413.
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Tim_Mayert
Level 9

Michael, could you let me know where in development case #IOC-000079413 is and is there any expected release date for this?

For Chaining we require Major/Minor and Patch support and therefore if it will be coming out soon then that would be great.

Thanks,
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MichaelU
Level 12 Flexeran
Level 12 Flexeran

Tim, there's no current expected release date for that issue. We've encountered too many limitations with Windows Installer's "support" for embedded chaining to focus on it for future development. We encourage using a Suite project (or Suite/Advanced UI project in InstallShield 2012 Spring) for a bootstrap chainer that can handle various combinations of .msi and .msp files much more cleanly.
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Tim_Mayert
Level 9

The main reason we wanted this for the Chain is because the vast majority of our customers perform GPO pushes with our software and therefore one of the main requirements are for us to supply .msi solutions for pushing out our software. A chain therefore provides a single .msi file instead of multiple .msi products.

We are looking into at least making the Chain handle minor upgrades, creating custom actions that will detect what is installed and to be installed and determine if the install is to be Major/Clean, Minor, New, or repair. So hopefully we can get this working.

We have not yet tried Suite product as we actually have our own that we created before your's came out that currently handles installing like a Chain, but can correctly handle Minor, Major, New, and repair modes. It also allows us to trigger custom actions throught out the process, which I did not see in your Suite installer, unless I missed something there..

Thanks,
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