NigelShaw
Posts: 58
Joined: Wed Apr 01, 2015 12:45 am

Creating Update

Mon Aug 22, 2022 6:48 am

Hey

have my update working now. My solution is some 80mb of an update download, 75mb of which are library references. Is there a way to work an update so that i only need to install the updated exe instead of the whole package?

Thanks

Liviu
Posts: 1035
Joined: Tue Jul 13, 2021 11:29 am
Contact:  Website

Re: Creating Update

Thu Aug 25, 2022 10:10 am

Hello,

You can achieve this scenario using a patch. Usually, in order to obtain a patch, you will need two versions of your product: v1 and v2 - the patch being simply the diff between those two.

So basically, Windows Installer (the base technology that Advanced Installer is built upon) has two ways of upgrading a setup, those being:

- a major upgrade (we will refer to this as upgrade)

- a minor upgrade (we will refer to this as a patch)

A patch is usually much smaller in size and it consists of the diffs between two packages (an MSI is basically a database). After diffing two MSIs (e.g. version 1.0.0 and 1.0.1) the changes will be saved into the patch file (MSP). At install time, the patch basically attaches to the already installed MSI, i.e.: version 1.0.0 is installed --> we apply the patch --> we obtain version 2.0.0.

One advantage of patches consists in the fact that it is much smaller in size. However, a disadvantage would be the fact that it can not act like a standalone installation - it is imperative that the older version is already installed.

More details about this in our articles:

1. Authoring a Windows Installer patch

2. Creating Patches


Hope this helps!

Best regards,
Liviu
________________________________________
Liviu Sandu - Advanced Installer Team
Follow us: Twitter - Facebook - YouTube

Return to “Building Installers”