As far as I know, 'Always Overwrite' for Dynamic File Linking is only available for InstallScript Only projects. I recently found this out the hard way and had to convert an InstallScript MSI project to InstallScript Only to be able to use it. I have not tried InstallShield 2012 or 2012 Spring, though - this was for InstallShield 2011.
This seems to be a long-standing problem. I don't understand why the ISX default action on individual files is "Windows Installer Versioning Rules (Recommended)" but for ISX Dynamic File Linking, the default action seems to be "Never Overwrite". Why on earth would the defaults be different, especially considering that there are no overwrite controls on Dynamic File Linking?
To make matters wierder, if you have had individual files in your project that are then converted to Dynamic File Linking later, they seem to continue to honour the Windows installer versioning rules. However, if you then add a new file to the dynamically linked folder (one that this ISX project has not seen before) it defaults to NOT overwriting the file. Very inconsistent.
The only reason that I went to dynamic file linking is because ISX is choking on the number files that we are installing. It seems like every time we move our projects to upgraded versions of ISX, files and folders are duplicated in the database. ISX never seems to be able to clean up the DB, so it slows to a crawl when trying to perform actions such as sorting files into features, which can take a couple of minutes to update the screen after each sort operation.
I get the feeling that no one is interested in these problems. I guess I need to take a fresh look at alternative solutions. Looks like advanced installer does this correctly.
