Our setup installs some HLP and CHM help files on the target PC. As recommended, we have defined one component for each help file in our Basic MSI project.
But is there any way to version these files in the same way assemblies are versioned, so that they have a file version attribute?
I know this question is not directly related to InstallShield, but it is relevant for the deployment of our application.
You could place the help file(s) into a merge module and reference the merge module in you project at a specific version. In our situation, we had some thin-client apps that have hundreds of loose files in the help. We didn't want to have these files show up in the component list and we wanted to isolate them as a separate object. Placing them into a merge module was the perfect solution. By doing this, we eliminated the gobs of meaningless files which were contaminating our components list, we insured that there is only one valid help for a program at a given version, and we encapsulated the help so that it is only a reference in the redistributables section of the InstallShield IDE. We can now update the help separately from the install package and each time the install package is built, it automatically picks up the latest and greated help that it needs.
