Hello All, I think this might be a stupid question, but I just want to confirm my suspicions of why I am having problems. We have a product that was already released to customers at v1.0.0, after release it was found that the original release was missing an empty directory that will cause a blocking failure in certain situations. For context, we release full installers for our initial releases. After that, all releases are patch only. I've been tasked with adding this folder back in our next patch, however there is a catch. The patch must be able to be uninstalled. So, this means I cannot add new rows to the CreateFolder table, since that would disable the ability to uninstall the patch. I was asked by development to "just add a custom action that makes the folders", however, from my testing, I don't think this is possible. It appears that the only custom actions that get executed by my patches are those which existed in the original release, any custom actions I add appear to never get executed. This makes sense to me, however, I cannot find anything in documentation that states this explicitly. My theory is this: You cannot add custom actions to a patch only. To do this, you would need to modify the original installer and add the custom action and then generate your patch from that, however, that would be stupid since it would make more sense to just add the folder the right way.  My question is, is this assumption correct? If so, is there someplace in official documentation that specifically confirms the behavior above? Of course, it's also possible that I am doing something wrong. I don't think so, but that's always a possibility. Any insight would be very helpful. Regards, Mike ... View more

Hello All, This may be a stupid question, but, I am stumped. I have a Basic MSI project and in the upcoming release, there is a series of five subfolders that need to be removed along with their contents during upgrade. In each component, I added RemoveFile records to remove the files, and added a RemoveFile record to remove the parent folder when empty. The problem I am having is, when doing a "clean" install, i.e. not an upgrade, these subfolders are being created. Of course the files don't get copied to them, because they don't exist, but the folders get made anyway. My question is, how does one stop InstallShield from creating these empty folders on a new install? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Mike ... View more

Hello Folks, I have an install that has top-level Features and Sub Features which contain a single component that holds the Registry settings for the Feature. For example: FeatureA ComponentA (Windows service) SubFeatureA SubComponentA (Windows service parameters stored in Registry) Assume there is a custom dialog that sets some checkboxes, text fields, etc. which are stored in the Registry via SubComponentA. I've been tasked with making it so that when installed and the user selects the "Change" option in Programs and Features, the options can be modified and written back to the Registry. The way that I have approached this is that I have a custom dialog (several actually) that collects all of the settings from the user and assigns them to properties as a series of events attached to the "Next" buttons for each dialog. This part works fine for a "clean install" and I persist the settings for "Modify" using system searches which also works well. My approach has been to attach new events to the "Next" buttons on the custom dialog that will re-install the SubFeatures containing the Components with the Registry settings. For example, something like:   Reinstall: Condition: Installed And Not REMOVE="ALL" And _IsMaintenance="Change" And (&SubComponentA=3 Or !SubComponentA=3) FeatureName: SubComponentA   Several variations of this have been attempted and I either end up in a spot where things behave correctly when I want to reinstall, but not remove. Or sometimes, it's the other way around. In all cases, I have never reliably been able to update the Registry settings, and now I am not even sure if I am on the right track. I'm likely missing something simple here that is just lost on me.  Any help would be greatly appreciated. Take care, Mike ... View more