Howto to update the updater?

[R.Mueller]

Hi Advanced Installer Team,

We are now using your updater mechanism to update installations on the customer side to a newer version of our product. Mainly we are using minor updates (aka patches) to update from on major or minor version to a later one. This happens a couple of times a year. Secondly we provide a "big" new version once each year, which will be published as a major version. We are supporting several major versions of the last years, when they have been updated to the latest patch level.

Due to limitations of (Microsoft or Advanced Installer?) we have to stick with the same version of Advanced Installer we used for building these major versions when creating all subsequent patches.

So far, so good.

Hence the mechanism of using the Advanced Updater is quite new, it might happen, that Advanced Installer is fixing bugs with later versions of the product. Due to issues we experienced in the past, we would like to use the chance to update the updater.exe in the patches we provide for our product.

The question is, how to do so?

I noticed, that the "c:\Program Files (x86)\Caphyon\Advanced Installer 12.8\stubs\x86\Updater.exe" is different in size and properties compared to the updater.exe later in the final setup. I assume, this happens, when the updater.exe is modified to get the icon and file properties defined in the setup project. I tried to replace an 11.1 version of the stub file with the 13.0 version, but it seems that the final update process is hanging then.
Due to the limitation, that I have to use the same version of Advanced Installer for creating subsequent patches, there must be a way of updating this important piece of the product.

So final question is: How to update the updater?
Side question: Is it possible to remove the need of using the same version of Advanced Installer for the major and subsequent patch versions?

Cheers,

Roland

[Eusebiu]

Hi Roland,

Due to limitations of (Microsoft or Advanced Installer?) we have to stick with the same version of Advanced Installer we used for building these major versions when creating all subsequent patches.

This limitation appear because during the upgrade of Advanced Installer, the new version may contain new features and automatically new files related to those features (i.e. DLL custom actions) which will be used when building the MSI.

So, if two version of your product are created with different versions of Advanced Installer some resource files they use may be different or even not exist from a version to another, but there are some patch rules that does not support this.

However, it is not always necessary to create the major versions of your product using the same version of Advanced Installer, but you can only find this out by testing and see if you get any error.

Hence the mechanism of using the Advanced Updater is quite new, it might happen, that Advanced Installer is fixing bugs with later versions of the product.

Please keep in mind that the Advanced Updater feature was implemented more than 10 years ago, it was included in Advanced Installer 3.4 and it is a very stable feature. Indeed, issues may appear in time, but not critical ones.

So final question is: How to update the updater?

I have not tested this, but it should work to update the updater only by replacing the "updater.exe" and "updater-res.dll" stub files from the older version of Advanced Installer with a newer version, then build your major version with that old version of Advanced Installer. For example:

• -replace C:\Program Files (x86)\Caphyon\Advanced Installer 12.8\stubs\res\Updater.exe with C:\Program Files (x86)\Caphyon\Advanced Installer 13.0\stubs\res\Updater.exe
  -replace C:\Program Files (x86)\Caphyon\Advanced Installer 12.8\stubs\res\Updater-res.dll with C:\Program Files (x86)\Caphyon\Advanced Installer 13.0\stubs\res\Updater-res.dll

Side question: Is it possible to remove the need of using the same version of Advanced Installer for the major and subsequent patch versions?

I'm afraid that this is not possible when the scenario I explained above applies (some files are added or removed from Advanced Installer).

Just let me know if you have any other question.

Best regards,
Eusebiu