Software Deployment

First and formost you should be clear that self heal and repair are two different things in an msi,self heal helps the application maitnain its resiliency ,it boils down to the set keypaths and advertised shorcuts
while in repair you can reinstall the msi ,you can change public properties ARPNOREMOVE,NOREPAIR etc to disable this feature
so basically its in the msi check this article

http://msiworld.blogspot.com/2008/10/difference-between-self-heal-and-repair.html

I would like to remove the automatic self healing/repairWhy? It's one of the major features of Windows Installer. As Rajdeep says, it gives applications some resiliency.

Thank you rajdera1, after reading your article I realize that it is the Self Healing feature I want to disable. It says in that article;
"When the application is launched by advertised shortcut, it checks for all the key paths of the Current Feature, if any of the key paths is missing it will launch Repair."

1. I only have one Shortcut and it is set to advertised-no
2. When it comes to Key Paths and Current feature I have no idea how to configure or actually remove the key paths so that it will not start the repair.

Is it possible to just disable self healing for the package? Or do I have to remove key paths so that the self healing feature doesn't trigger the repair.
I have never packaged before so I need a little more detail so I where I can find and disable/delete these key paths if that is what I need to do.

Disabling or Removing Keypath puts you into a soupy situation dear[8D][8D] ,and as per my understanding none of the companies will encourage this...what happens if some file gets replaced or deleted accidentally?....the whole purpose of using an msi gets defeated[X(]

Apart from disabling advtisement of shortcut try to use this property DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS = 1....dont even think about touching keypaths unless u want to break the application....[:'(][&:][&:]

VBScab, I agree that this is a great feature but for this particular software I need to disable it. I am actually creating a msi package for a software we are using. The vendor gave me all the files and instructions of what needs to go where and what needs to be registered. I never really do this but the vendors installation is a really messy installation at best and has been causing issues for years. So I thought I would create a nice clean package myself for my company. One of the issues is that almost every week we update the software with what we call "catalogs" these catalogs updates graphics, pricing etc. for the software to use. Now some of these catalogs actually do certain changes to some of the files that then triggers the self healing function to start a repair. The repair then overwrites these files and the new catalog does not work. This is the reason I need to disable this feature. If it would not be for that I would not even consider it.

For disabling self healing u should not have advertised shortcuts and u also should not have com entries in your package. And there are some other options by which you can disable self healing discussed in the following thread

http://itninja.com/question/service276&mpage=1&key=&

But I have suggetion.

Are you having very large number of files in your package or you know all the files which are going to be updated every time?

If you have less number of files in your package then you can create a component per file and make them as never overwrite if key path exists or can do the same thing if you know the files which are getting updated.

Thank you rajdera1 I will try to add that property and see what happens.

naveen.packager, it is about 17400 files in over 400 directories. What would your suggestion be for that, I am willing to try pretty much anything.

hmm...then it would be difficult to set one file per component.

Then you can try by selecting the file in each component which you know that it will surely get updated then set those files as key paths for the components and set never overwrite attribute for each component This will give you some validation errors coz u should have reg key path for the files going in user profiles.

I am just giving you my idea and i am not sure about this.

if there are more files and you are willing to set them as do not overwrite then try it through the component table it will take less than 2 mins [:D]

I would suggest two solutions:
1. If possible "install" the catalog files to a network if possible.
2. Have the catalog files in a separate package which you then handle as updates.

ORIGINAL: rajdera1

Apart from disabling advtisement of shortcut try to use this property DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS = 1....dont even think about touching keypaths unless u want to break the application....

By setting the DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS = 1 it seems to work the way we want to. Thank you.

That sounds Great [:D] ..You are Most Welcome