How to view the contents of a Patch

[lakshmanjh]

Hi,

I would like to know what are the files installed by the patch (msp file) after the msp is installed.Is it possible to get the file contents installed by the patch.


Thanks a lot.

[Cary_R]

Hi There,

The simple answer is 'Sort of'.

You can open an *.msp file in Direct MSP Mode using InstallShield or Orca, and there's a flag in the File table that indicates that a patch is updating those file records. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa368596(v=vs.85).aspx - 4096 - 'PatchAdded')

Now, that doesn't guarantee that the files will get installed -- just that they are contained within the patch. There's a chain of events that determine if the file gets installed, starting with if the feature/component is requested to be installed, and then later looking at whether the file should be overwritten or not based on the file overwrite rules, and the value of the REINSTALLMODE property.

This makes is complicated to definitively get a list of files updated during the application of a patch, short of writing a verbose log parser. As far as taking on the task of taking that task on, I would say to just take a look at log entries that start with 'FileCopy', as these will refer to a patch cab file by name for the source file, rather than something like 'Data#.cab' or an uncompressed source.

Hope this helps!

[LouisE]

You can open the .ism file that was created by the patch, it will show you everything (remember to check the allow the patch to be uninstalled), which was our problem, it was unchecked.