InstallAware

I am presently evaluating InstallAware with the hopes of purchasing the product to replace InstallShield at our organization. However, one key feature that we need is the ability to mark a file included in our setup program as "Always Overwrite". (Basically, tell Windows Installer to ignore versioning rules for a particular file).

Is there a way to do this with InstallAware 7 (Developer Edition)?

This is not an InstallAware limitation but a Windows Installer limitation. Since InstallAware uses Windows Installer to perform the underlying installation tasks (such as file copy), it is not possible to force overwriting of files.

Thankfully, InstallAware extends Windows Installer with the MSIcode script, so you can manually delete files/folders using the Delete Files Recursive statement before invoking Windows Installer with Apply Install. This will ensure the new files are copied over the old ones which will no longer exist!

Thanks for the suggestion. I understand that this is a Windows Installer issue. However, I'd like to suggest that this is indeed possible to implement. After all, your competitor (InstallShield) has had this feature for several versions now (my guess is that they must run code to delete the existing files for any file that the author has marked as "Always Overwrite").

We install a number of non-versioned files with our application, so this is a critical feature that is missing from your product (for us at least). I've also seen a few other posts from other InstallShield users looking for this feature as well. Perhaps you could add this as a feature request for your development team to consider for a future version.

Nothing happens behind-the-scenes in InstallAware, we consider this the strength of our product. You can do the exact same thing as InstallShield by inserting a Delete Files Recursive command in your MSIcode script right before the Apply Install command to achieve the exact same effect. Except that you have full control over what gets deleted and when.