Check that no file is forgotten for the installshield project

Question

we actually build an InstallShield project for our application with the functionality to include files dynamic into a component. All files will be taken which are in a specific place.

Because of problems, which are not part of this question, we want to change this to components where we add files explicit to custom separated components.

The question is, is there a best practice for this? We have the small fear that we easily can forget to add files to the component we new created. These can be dll files, .config files, pdfs or just xml.

(We build the installer every night using TFS.)

Answer 1

We found a solution for the problem.
What we wanted to solve:

1. During the build we want to be informed if files got removed
2. During the build we want to be informed if new files are missing

we solved this by two more or less easy things.

1. Information if a file is removed
This is easy sone, we have all files added explicitly, each single file is an own component now, if one file is missing the whole project does not build with the exact error message.

2. Information for missing files
For this we wrote a small tool which runs by a prebuild event of the installshield project.
There it opens the *.ism file as an xml file and searches for the "Files" table.
Than it takes all files from the drop folder and looks if all files are in there.

If there are files missing but we don't expect them, like pdb files or test dlls, we have an additional text file we just called "IgnoreList".
The tool skips these files by the check.

Now we are on a very good state to get informed directly on the next morning if the project was able to build or not, and if not what happened, so we can be sure that in the final target application are files are there :-)