InstallAware

I've been trying to take advantage of the patching feature in IA Studio for deploying small changes via Web Deployments. I've successfully setup the mechanism to do web updates, etc. Was trying to create my first patch but something is wrong. The base version is 450mb. It includes both a 32 and 64 bit versiion of SQL Express as well as other large 3rd party components. None of these packages have changed between the current versiion and the base version, yet the patch is including them. In fact the patch is including a lot of things and its total size is over 317mb.

Can anyone hep me solve this mystery? IA documentation suggests this is all very easy. It sure seems that way, but it isn't working for me. To be sure there is nothng weird going on with the base version I first created, I have since recompiled it fresh into a new Web Deploy version with about 8 Media blocks. I pointed that that exact file and immediately tried to create a patch from it. Nothing at all should be different between the current version and that base version. I'd expect the patch to be tiny, yet it is still over 317mb and contains things like the SQL Server 2008 R2 MSI installer, etc.

Thanks
Mike

After experimenting for hours yesterday I followed a lot of leads that all lead to dead ends and still cannot successfully create a patch file that accurately contains only difference files. This patch builder process cannot seem to handle embedded third party msi's and exe's. These files (often large) get included in the patch every time. Is this a known issue and to be expected? I see nothing in the documentation to suggest that.

For now I've had to add Compiler Variable IF statements to exclude any such files when the BUILDMODE=PATCH.

Can anyone shed som light on this for me or point me to some documentation? I've already read the White Paper on building Patches and see no answers.

Thanks
Mike

So in the end, after weeding through all the other issues due to my ignorance on the subject of MSP creation, it seems the problem is due to a problem in IA (at least my version anyway - 2012 Studio Admin). If you change the CACHESSOURCES to TRUE from the default value of "DEFAULT", then all my components get included in the patch file. if I turn it back to "DEFAULT" then it works.

This is a certainty as I've tried it several times back and forth once I finally discovered it. Having said that, I can't be sure if it is dependent on other conditions. I'd be very interested if someone could confirm it for me. But for now, on my WIn7 Pro pc with IA 2012 SA, setting CACHESOURCES = DEFAULT is a must for creating a patch. Too bad because I wanted to be able to cache setups for single file installs too.

I created a new thread on this subject to help give this attention if others are searching on CACHESOURCES. See it here:
http://www.installaware.com/forum/viewt ... f=2&t=7975