Software Deployment

what's the application?

When you say you've moved all the features into a single parent feature. Do you mean the 10 features are all child features of your new feature? Or are you saying that you've moved all the components from the 10 features into 1 feature?

Hi Stabish

Where's the advertise shortcut located? is it within the parent feature or one of the child feature.. I don't think that you have to create an ActiveSetup since you have an advertise shortcut which triggers repair..

Do not alter features in VendorMSI.., You donot know why the Vendor has created 10features in an application. and If you do component assignment and remove features, Application might not work as expected. [:@]

Have a read of John McFadyen's Windows Live blogs on self-healing.

timmsie - All the Features are now a child feature to my new feature.

thugz888 - Shortcut is located under one of the child feature.

mekaywe- I can accomplish this with an Active setup by copying and xcopy command in my active setup stub path but i actually wannated my MSI to self heal n copy the registry setting.

VBScab - I started wondering what happend to you, there were about 30 sum hits but no reply to my post yesterday, im glad to hear from you & i will follow up on John McFadyens blog hope i'll find something good there....

stabish,

3 things

1) try making a new parent level feature that contains your CU settings. See if that will get repaired ...
2) when using Active Setup you could use the command msiexec /fu <ProductCode> instead of an xcopy, thus letting Windows Installer handle the setting
3) there's a very long and fairly recent thread on self healing mechanisms somewhere on these message boards, you should try to find it.

Rgds,

PJ

ORIGINAL: stabish

VBScab - I started wondering what happend to you, there were about 30 sum hits but no reply to my post yesterday, im glad to hear from you & i will follow up on John McFadyens blog hope i'll find something good there....





EASY EASY

if ian decides to quit appdeploy or go on a holiday to hawaii hope you will cope without him

as was suggested

what you need

an advertised shortcut

create a feature make it the parent - add your hkcu stuff into your hkcu components

make sure the child features have your parent feature as the top feature

features/ features component table

and thats it

over to you ian =)

I've been trying to work out why anyone would move all an MSI's features into one. Then I thought that maybe the OP wants every feature to be repaired, if any component is broken which is..........an individual approach.

As I keep saying, if you go the AS route, remember that you get no self-healing: it's a one-hit deal.

ASetup it is :) thanks guys

ASetup it is :) thanks guys

Stabish,

while it's good you've chosen a solution, I would like to point out that, given the fact that you're able to use advertised shortcuts and self-healing, you should really try to. I've always considered Active Setup to be an alternative in situations where you can't use self-healing. Self-healing is, in my opinion, a much more stable and dependable solution. I understand that you may be under time pressure to deliver the package, but I can only advise you to try the suggestions in this thread and work on the better option some more. It might save you grief in the future.

Also, like Ian said, unless you have a really good reason to reshuffle the vendor msi's feature structure (and personally I cannot really think of any), you should really leave that as-is and add your User Settings in a top-level feature alongside it.

Rgds,

PJ

Ian,

I think it more so has something to do with people's understanding or lack of on how Self Healing works. Where I work currently, they were moving all components to a single Complete feature and when needed, create an HKCU feature which is then set as the parent feature of the Complete feature. What I realized was they didn't understand the difference between Feature and Component level healing.

Another thing was they didn't quite understand that there's a difference between Self Healing and Self Repair.

@Cygan,

Ian quitting AppDeploy?!?!?! He'd have to attend meetings for that before he can peel himself away [:D]

What is difference between self healing and repair

What is run,run once,active setup

LOL...another interview lined up?