Question

I want to make a installation which can be both new installation and update installation. When it was used as an update installation, I want some files to be updated regardless the version and modified datetime. And some files would never be updated.

What I tried: Set the ‘REINSTALLMODE’ to ‘amus’. And set the ‘Never overwrite’ property of never updated files’ components to be ‘Yes’.

What I get: It doesn’t work. Those components with ‘Never overwrite = yes’ are still updated somehow.

My question: Is this right? REINSTALLMODE has the higher priority than component’s ‘Never overwrite’ property? How to deal with this partial updates issue?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

MSI has specific File replacement logic (Archived link).

I would look into doing a Major upgrade.

Assuming these are unversioned files (for example text/xml config files, not assemblies) I would manually set the File Version on any file I wanted to always be updated (the manually set version will override what is already installed), and leave alone the others which the file replacement logic should ignore.

Here is a doc about REINSTALLMODE=amus which mentions the ‘a’ means ignore file versioning rules and update everything. not what you want. Also, I believe REINSTALLMODE is generally for ‘repair’ operations, not install/upgrade anyways.