Working with Advanced Installer Synchronized Folders

If you aren't familiar with Synchronized Folders in Advanced Installer, they are similar to Dynamic Folders in InstallShield.  Basically, they allow you to dynamically load files from the underlying file system for deployment by Advanced Installer.

Unfortunately, when you set up a Synchronized Folder in Advanced Installer, it is not very clear from the documentation how to build your installation package when moving from a development workstation to a CI build server.

The two commands associated with Synchronized Folders are ResetSync and NewSync

http://www.advancedinstaller.com/user-guide/reset-sync.html

http://www.advancedinstaller.com/user-guide/new-sync.html

Even if you point Advanced Installer to a new target directory and you use the /NewSync command, you will get the error message:

This folder is already synchronized.

Therefore, after consulting Advanced Installer support, I was informed that I needed to run a combination of these commands in order to update the synchronized folder to a new target directory.

Therefore, I had to run the /ResetSync command first:

AdvancedInstaller.com /edit MyProject.aip /ResetSync APPDIR\SynFolder -clearcontent
Then, I had to finally run the /NewSync command:

AdvancedInstaller.com /edit MyProject.aip /NewSync APPDIR\SynFolder C:\MyProjFolder
Lastly, I could build the resultant installation package!

[<path>\]AdvancedInstaller.com /rebuild [project_file_path] { [-buildslist <builds_list>] | [-configurationslist <configurations_list>] }

That did the trick for me!!