Best Practices for Components

InstallAnywhere 2013

When you are planning what components you want to include in your project, consider the following best practice recommendations:

Make unique components for files that will need to be updated separately. For example, a Help feature may have both a User Guide and Javadocs. However, the User Guide may be updated more frequently than the Javadocs. Make the two items separate components; this enables you to define a unique User Guide component and to version and update it individually as needed.
Components should make logical sense. If you build a suite installer, keep track of the pieces of applications that are shared between different products. When componentizing a product for versioning purposes, designate the version of the component (in the Advanced Designer > Organization page > Components view) when the component is added to the project.
Components with similar UUIDs—If the UUIDs of the components are shared across installers or along with merge modules and installed in the same USER_INSTALL_DIR, that component is treated as a shared component. The uninstaller for the last product that references this component will uninstall it.