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sgoldstein
Level 6

Creating many installers with common parts

I currently have 5, soon to be many more, installers with common parts:

1. Files
2. Custom Actions
3. Registry Keys
4. System Searches
5. Common Release Configuration
6. UI
7. ...

Every time I want to make a change to these common parts, I currently have to make that change in each and every installer. This is not scalable and will not be a good long term approach.

What mechanism(s) is available to support this use case? It needs to support pulling out the common parts so I can maintain and release them in one place and then add them to each installer at build or runtime. It also needs to support all of the upgrade and patch scenarios for both the common parts and the specialized parts for each installer.

Thank you for the help.

Scott
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schmoli
Level 6

It sounds like you should research Merge Modules and how to create Merge Module projects with Installshield... it gets a little trickier with UI stuff, but it may be enough to help you out. You can also look into Chained Installers, although going through some issues with them right now I am not a big fan at the moment.
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sgoldstein
Level 6

Thanks for the input.

I'm thinking of going the merge module approach, but I know they can be tricky and have run into problems with them in the past.

Is the Chained Installer feature supposed to "replace" merge modules or are there different use cases for merge modules versus chained installers?

Are there any other options besides these two approaches?
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