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I have spent at least the past two weeks (part-time) trying to work out the right settings to get AI to update my simple app from a disk location and a web location. That means I have gone through the v1, v2, and updater project sequence hundreds of times.

It's a big headache! I was constantly switching among projects, comparing Update.txt file/url locations, MSI update installer locations, product versions, and so on.

My feature request is for you to merge/add the Updater section as a new section after Product Information in the main products. The updater section is only one section and would enable users to work inside of one project and specify path values in only one place.

Ideally, in my view, I would put the version in one place in the product tab, to be used throughout the project, including the version (in two places) used in the current updater project.

I would put all the paths/URLs on one page too, to make them easy to check for consistency.
UPDATER:
Path/URL to read the Update.txt file - it says where to get the MSI to download/copy for installation
Path to the updater MSI to get file size/checksums: (this should be greyed out and defined by the output path in the build section)

I could take more time to propose more details for the UI, but my time might be wasted at this point. I'm sure you have thousands of feature requests that you have on a list somewhere.

Hello,

Thank you for your suggestion, but I'm afraid that is not possible.

Your main and the updater are two different projects and can not be merged.

Best regards,
Catalin

I understand that they are currently two different projects. I am just suggesting that they don't have to be.

You could keep the separate Updater project type if you liked.

I made the suggestion because I ran a software development company for 25 years with 25 programmers. We had 1M lines of code in our code base. I can see that it would be easy to add another Updater section and its few tabs to the MSI projects.

(smiling now) Are you saying that your devs are not capable of copy-modifying the 1 or 2 sections of Updater settings in the Updater project type into the main MSI installer project that already has a dozen sections of settings in the main project? And then have it generate a simple 20-line ASCII Update.txt file if the user checked a "Generate an Updater.txt file" in the Updater section?

Anyhow, it's a suggestion, and it's your product. I'm just saying as one of your customers that it's a headache (a bad, non-optimal) UX experience to jump back and forth so many times when doing updater projects. There's a much better way.

Hello,

Thank you for your feedback!

I will forward it to our dev team and if this will be implemented, I will update this thread.

Best regards,
Catalin

Forwarding it to the dev team is all that I can ask. Thank you.

I'm sure they have thousands of feature requests and bugs to work on, especially for enterprise customers.

But I think this addition would *immediately* cut down the complexity of making update installers, by at least half. For the customer, it means less time, less work, higher reliability, and fewer mistakes and do-overs.

In development, it's not often you get improvement chances like this for so little work (and the work is low-risk too, BTW). You don't have to touch the existing update projects, so existing customers can just continue to use them in the normal way if that is their preference.

Hello,

You are welcome!

Not so sure, but you might benefit of our newer "Project Solution" feature, which allows you have have your main project and the updater project in the same solution - perhaps this will help you.

Go to "Files" --> "Add" --> "Existing Project" and you can add the updater project there.

After that, you can easily switch between the two from under the "Solution" tab.
Best regards,
Catalin

Yes, that looks helpful. At least they will be easier to access together. Maybe one day your devs will merge the two tabs into one project.

Hello,

Glad it helps!

If such a feature will be added in Advanced Installer, I will update this thread.

Best regards,
Catalin