windows-installerupgradewise

Wise Installer not removing old files on upgrade


We have a legacy installer that was built with Wise, and we have a situation where some .ASP files were replaced with corresponding .INC files to deal with security concerns; so during the upgrade, those old .ASP files must be removed. It's working in one of the directories, but in the other two directories, the old .ASP files are still there after the upgrade.

For all of the directories in the website, there is a RemoveFile entry that tells the installer to remove all of the files during uninstall, so I would have thought that would be enough to get the installer to remove those old files, but apparently not.

In an attempt to fix the problem, I added RemoveFile entries that remove the specific files on install and tried the upgrade again, but even that didn't work.

Short of writing a custom action to get rid of those files, does anyone have any ideas on how to get it to work?


Solution

  • It turns out that my problem wasn't MSI-related. One of the custom actions in the install was backing up all of the web site files so that they could be restored by another custom action later in the upgrade, which was causing most of the .ASP files that we wanted to be removed to be put back in. In the one directory where the old .ASP file appeared to have been removed, it was because that directory was hidden and, so, was not backed up and, therefore, not restored. Between the backup and restore, the MSI was actually doing its job and deleting everything from the old build prior to the new stuff being installed. (Shows you how long I've been away from that project that I forgot that that was happening. :-( )