I have two setups of the same product: Previous setup and Latest Setup, where Latest Setup is a Minor Upgrade on Previous Setup. Installation of Minor Upgrade works perfectly. I added a patch configuration (Patch Design node), inserted Previous and Latest Setup and built a patch.
The patch seems to install the changed files BUT during patch execution the property INSTALLDIR unexpectedly changes to another value. the value it changes to is a directory beneath my original INSTALLDIR and which is the location of a dynamic file link of one component. The change of INSTALLDIR is also stated in the MSI log file.
Befor building the patch I did the following: I had to re-add two components which where missing and which had to exist in order to build a patch. These components have no files, only a name and GUID, and condition 1=0.
What could be wrong here? Has anyone encountered a similar case?
I don't know what happened here, but changing the Destination of the two re-added components to a directory other than INSTALLDIR (ProgramFilesFolder in my case) solved the issue.
I saw this just recently as well. I think this is a case of Windows Installer getting confused by the change in component destination.
Basically, the old components that were missing are having their current target path resolved to where they were installed before (since each subsequent run of the MSI won't natively track the property and path changes of the previous run). Since the new dummy components point to a different directory path than the old component, it resolves the new directory table entry to where the original component got installed to.
I think given this, there should be an upgrade validator for changing component destinations across minor upgrades (currently none exist to my knowledge).
