.RRA files

View Full Version : .rra files. How to prevent?

kallen

04-17-2002, 07:28 PM

Help... Has anyone had this problem.
Our InstallShield program is 2 fold.
The 2 options are:
Install or Upgrade.
If they select upgrade the basic intention is to laydown new application files in a specified app folder, then run database upgrade scripts.
The laydown of the app files is where we sometimes see problems.
The directory is pre-existing and contains files athat are going to be overwritten with newer files. The problem is that sometimes it creates .rra files instead of overwriting the files that are already there. Why are the .rra files being created and how can I force the files to be overwrite the existing app files no matter what?

Sometimes it overwrites them with no problem, and sometimes it creates .rra files and does not replace the existing files.

Thanks;
Kevin

Happy Days

04-18-2002, 08:09 AM

Hi,

These rra files are nothing but the files that are created in the Temporary directory when the setup is extracted. These probably affects you since the files that needs to be overwritten are in use at that time.

To Overwrite the already existing files, make the 'Overwrite' property of the file-group containing that file to 'ALWAYS OVERWRITE.....'.

Also, if you are not sure that the files that are going to be overwritten will be in Use at that time, then make the 'Potentially Locked' property of that file group to 'Yes'.

Thanx.

kallen

04-18-2002, 08:25 AM

I already have the Always overwrite flag set, but did not have the potentially locked set to yes. Would this cause this behavior?
Also, could this behaviour happen if the files to overwrite were set read only?

Happy Days

04-18-2002, 08:33 AM

Hi,

Yes i think......if the files are Read only it is difficult for IS to overwrite on it.

To remove the Read Only tag from the sile, you can use the function SetFileInfo to mark that file as Normal. After this, try the setup again and see......

Thanx.

RyanHart

07-18-2003, 09:27 AM

I have seen the exact same behavior as kallen, the author of this thread.

A number of our customers are seeing this bug, and I don't know how to dupe it. It's happening to files that are never locked (or set to read-only): basically, the file isn't updated, and then an "intermediate" file, which looks like the original, but has the extension .rra, is placed in the same directory. I don't know why InstallShield thinks these files are locked, but they are provably NOT locked.

If anyone knows how to dupe this problem (and I don't think it's the "Potentially Locked" value) please help me. I GOTSTA KNOW!

Ry

yatest5

07-24-2003, 10:13 AM

set the Potentially Locked thing to TRUE for all your file groups, that should fix the problem, IS will update these files after the next reboot.

aratj9

05-03-2007, 03:45 PM

Though this topic is way too old now, thought it might be of some help to others so quoting my experiences here.

An RRA file is a file that is created for every locked file with the name as initial four letters of the locked file name and a random number. These .rra files are created when any file is found to be locked by InstallShield. And following are the reasons for InstallShield to find a file as locked:

File is really locked due to being open or referred by a service or program
File is read only and SetFileInfo is not called or failed prior to accessing the file using InstallScript
File is referencd by a Setup process or components such as STATUS with INDVFILESTATUS on.

The ALWAYS_OVERWRITE and POTENTIALLY_LOCKED operations are documented to solve this issue but in some scenarios I have found this to be failing.

I have not yet found a good solution to prevent .rra files from being created. In my project what I am doing is I am deleting them as I find them after/before my mass file operations. :)