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Lets say my current production version is 1.2.3 and the new product version is 1.2.3.4.

Now, during installation, it will throw a warning message saying something like "The setup has detected the version 1.02.003 of...... already installed. This setup updates ..... to the same version that is already installed, therefore this update is not needed. Do you want to install the update anyway? "

This will be very misleading. Does anybody know a solution for this?

Yan Sklyarenko
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gu2004
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1 Answers1

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It is not InstallShield, but rather Windows Installer, the underlying technology has the behavior you observe. Take a look at this article, which explains how Windows Installer treats versioning.

The important part for your case is this:

Note that Windows Installer uses only the first three fields of the product version. If you include a fourth field in your product version, the installer ignores the fourth field.

This explains why it considers the new one to be the same version. So, the suggestion is either change the third digit, or go with small updates instead. Here is how you can apply small updates by re-installing the product.

Yan Sklyarenko
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  • Thanks a lot Yan. I will try the small update you mentioned. Btw is it possible to suppress that windows installer warning? Doesn't install shield provide any hooks for this ? – gu2004 Jun 14 '13 at 08:18
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    There are ways of doing a major upgrade with only changing the fourth version. It's been answered around here many times. – Christopher Painter Jun 14 '13 at 11:52
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    thanks christopher, I searched for them and couldn't find any. Could you point to them? – gu2004 Jun 17 '13 at 05:59
  • I think Christopher was mentioning his own answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16642518/can-we-upgrade-1-0-0-0-to-1-0-0-1-while-changing-product-code – rsc Mar 27 '20 at 15:35