Upgrade issues

[BobSchaefer]

I'm working on an InstallAware project that upgrades an installshield installed suite of applications and I have several questions:

First, is it possible to do an upgrade without having to first completely remove the old version? With InstallShield I was able to do this where it would only update the new stuff.

Next, right now it does the complete uninstall, then install of our product and everything seems to go fine, until I look at the Add/Remove Programs window and I now see both versions installed. When I go to click on the remove of the older version, it of course complains, crashes and then gets removed from the list. If I now try to remove the IA version, it wants to install and not uninstall. What am I doing wrong with this? The script was imported from the Installshield script and heavily modified to work within IA and normal installation works great.

Since I'm on it, how do I disable the Change portion of the Add/Remove Programs and disable maintenance as well?

Thanks for any help you guys can give me!

Bob Schaefer

[BobSchaefer]

Help please! This is one of the last major hurdles for this installer!

[mills]

Are these two installers you're talking about both built by InstallAware or one with IA and one with InstallShield?

[BobSchaefer]

The older one (that I'm trying to upgrade) was built with installshield and the newer one is built with InstallAware. Basically we're migrating our installation software from InstallShield to InstallAware with this release and I need to make sure we can do this.

[BobSchaefer]

I just thought of another piece that might help things out, the IA version of the installer was started by importing the InstallShield XML project file. So, the IA version correctly sees that it should do an upgrade, fires off the uninstallation, and then continues on. Now, running the uninstallation separately works as expected in that the stuff isn't left in the Add/Remove programs.

Not sure if this helps things or not.

[mills]

InstallAware and InstallShield have different underlying architectures and to migrate from IS to IA, you will need to uninstall the old IS version and install the new IA version.

I am to understand that IS works a little differently from IA. At the current time, issuing a new version requires a previous version uninstall before the installation of the new version may proceed.

The scenario you described for minor updates can be satisfied with patching, which doesn't install the previous version, just updates the existing product.

We are working to implement a solution that works similar to IS in that you can issue a single newer installer and it will patch those existing installs and install fresh for those that haven't installed before. And this should be reasonable with our web media blocks-- you'll be able to issue a small web installer (possibly containing only the "patch") and for new installs, the remainder of the content could be downloaded.

[BobSchaefer]

Well I finally figured out what was happening and figured out a work-around for it. So, for others who may run into this, here's what I found:

The InstallShield version used the InstallScript MSI build version with a setup.exe. There is an MSI file behind the scenes that is associated with the Product Code, and in my case that was correctly removing the previous version of the application. Unfortunately, InstallShield decided to not point the Add/Remove Programs link to the MSI file, but rather a custom folder with their setup.exe residing in it. This part is not known by the MSI, and thus, not removed. So, I simply added logic to look in the registry under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\InstallShield_$PRODUCTCODE$ and remove that key. That got rid of the entry in the Add/Remove Programs window, which in my case is good enough. Note that I still do a remove by product code of the MSI as well, this just gets rid of a now broken entry in the Add/Remove Programs window.

So, with that resolved, I now just have the part about the Change button in the Add/Remove Programs window, how do I get rid of that button? I only want a remove button on that window.

Thanks
Bob Schaefer