our product's content changes pretty often. components are added, removed, changes location, etc. during the developement phase (as expected). each change requires me, as the installation developer, to manually apply the change in the components view. is there any known solution to do it automatically?
one way i thought about is to have a file with the installation content and write some script that will generate a components list out of it (i can do it in the XML format of the ISM).
but first i wanted to see how other people develope installations of products with many files. do you add each file manually? do you take everything from a directory using the "dynamic linking" method? anything else i haven't thought about?
You didn't mention the nature of the files you are dealing with. In our company we typically create a component for every assembly (executable), as per best practices. However we do have some large, dynamic text file areas where it is impossible to keep up with the development changes; so in those situations we create a component for each folder and use a dynamic link for content files. This allows development to add/remove files within a folder to their heart's content, and they only need our intervention where they are adding or removing folders.
FYI we do not use a recursive dynamic link because it has caused us innumerable problems when patching (QuickPatch) our released Product versions.
