I am having an issue that I'm guessing I'm just missing something really simple. I have a basic MSI project and a current release out in the field. We are developing a Major Upgrade for our next release.
The problem I am running into is that there are properties set during install of the previous release, that I want the Major Upgrade to pre-populate with. For example, if the user chose a different INSTALLDIR than the default, during the Major Upgrade install, the INSTALLDIR property should be set with the custom value.
This seems like a common thing someone would want but I just can't find the mechanism to do it.
I am not sure how you would read the custom directory out unless you have it stored in a registry key somewhere. You could do a system search for the installation directory perhaps and then store that in the value INSTALLDIR
By default the value of the destination folder should be [INSTALLDIR] so I imagine it should just work
So the major upgrade has no way of getting access to the previous version's properties?
I was going to resort to a system search for INSTALLDIR but I was hoping there was already a defined way to get to those properties, similar to how you have access to the properties in a "modify" scenario.
Think of your installer like any other application. Any data that it gathers during one run that it needs to remember later has to be stored somewhere. How is this extremely generic MSI technology supposed to know what you would like to know what you care to retrieve later, vs what you would like to re-generate on every launch?
Even if you decided to implement your own logic using MSI patterns to implement parameter-saving your own way, how are you going to distinguish between command-line parameters that you want to restore vs those that were only supposed to be set for the initial installation? For instance, the REMOVE, ADDLOCAL, and REINSTALL properties for instance. You would not want these values following every launch of the msi.
