uninstalling - restore old files

[AndyB]

Hi.

I have a quick question about AI.. I've used it and it is great (drag n drop would be a good addition to the UI though), and I have a question - does it support archiving overwritten files so that uninstalling will restore them?

I understand from the home page that AI does support rollback operations, but I guess this is part of the MSI technology during the install only, not afterwards?

Thanks for developing the product, I think it supports 99% of what we'd want it to do!

Andy

[Cata]

Hi Andy,

You are right, the rollback is implemented by Windows Installer. So I think you should test and see if it works as you need.

If it doesn't, the only solution I can see would be to have a custom action, but I am not sure if Advanced Installer can place custom actions at pre-install yet.

Try it out and send me an email at support at advancedinstaller dot com if it doesn't work: we'll try to find a solution.

Best regards,
Cata

[AndyB]

Thanks Cata.

I think the rollback works - but only if the installation is aborted during installation - ie, once complete, MSI deletes all the temporarily copied files. I know you can turn off the rollback, but there is still no support for running the rollback at a later date. never mind.

A custom action seems the best thing to do (perhaps generated automatically by AI), placed first in the sequence of actions.

This raises an issue I have with AI and custom actions - I cannot give a parameter to a custom action (I'd like to pass in the target dir for a recursive copy script to create a backup).

So, I'd like to request this as a feature - AI to auto-generate a copy-to-backup-dir script as the first action in the install, and a auto-copy-from-backup-dir as the last action in the uninstall. I'd also like to be able to give parameters to custom scripts.

thanks, Andy.

[Cata]

You can give parameters to custom actions. Make them EXE files and fill up the command line.

That's a pretty big thing to do and we'd have to make sure it is done when necessary, otherwise the disk space requirements would go throuhg the roof.

[AndyB]

thanks Cata. I found that that worked - only I figured out that I needed the [TARGETDIR] property to decide where to move the files from.

MSI has a MoveFiles table that is used for the backup-files option. This gets run (via MoveFiles action) before installing new files, so I think it should be easy to implement my requirement. (that's easy for me to say , I'll offer to help write this functionality if that's an option to me).

The disk space requirements is something for the installer-creator to decide whether to use or not. eg Microsoft gives the option with service packs, and our customer needs to be able to back out changes if they don't work as intended, so its a pretty important requirement for me.