Native Engine

[FridgeWheeL]

Good Day

I am in the process of rewriting our current MSI based installer using the Native Engine and have a few questions regarding the Native Engine.

Our installer has 4 independent services and the user is able to select which services to install or remove at any time.
An important fact to our business is that when the user wants to Upgrade or Modify the current version of our product, that the Installer does not do an Uninstall of our previous product but rather do an Upgrade by replacing the older files with the newer ones.

For Example, when the user has Service A & Service B Installed and wants to add Service C & Service D and remove Service A, if I use a single Native_Log, the installer would 1st uninstall Service A & Service B, then re-install Service B and newly install Service C & D. The service B being uninstalled & reinstalled is the undesired effect in the above example.

I resolved the above issue by setting custom log locations for each of the 4 services and only use the default log for registries and other default features the user can’t customise. This all works great and if the user runs the very same version of the installer and selects to uninstall a single service, I set the native_log to the specific custom log location so that the Apply Uninstall only executes the single log and only remove the specific service leaving the other services perfectly intact.

I am not sure whether the above solution is best practice and whether there is a more easy & clean way to accomplish our goals.

With these separate native_logs in place, upgrading seems to stage some problems:
I am able to detect the Previous Installation Native Logs location via the NATIVE_OLDLOG variable and surely I could use this to apply an uninstall from a new version installer if the user wanted to perform an uninstall, but my concern is whether I will be able to detect the original installer (1st New Install) native logs after a few upgrades, and also I can’t imagine that after a few upgrades; which would install additional new files not logged by the 1st install logs; would be uninstalled correctly.

I hope this somehow makes sense and that someone could advise me accordingly.

Regards

[FrancescoT]

Dear User,

If I haven't missed anything, you are handling a sort of multiple-instance installer with your approach.

Due of this and by keeping track of the setup log stores available on the target machine, the ones that you are currently Binding with the "NATIVE_LOGGING" pre-defined variable, you should be able to remove your First installation as well.

Regards