Summary

This article will clarify what the InstallShield IIS support covers.

Question

InstallShield provide project settings that will allow you to create and manage new IIS Web sites, applications, virtual directories, application pools, and Web service extensions. However can I use the IIS support to manage existing web sites that may already exist on a target server machine?

Answer

The intent of the IIS support in InstallShield is to mainly do one thing, install new IIS resources. Due to certain functionality limitations, InstallShield does not intent for the IIS view to be used to modify existing IIS resources already defined on the target machine.

If you want to manage existing web sites, you generally have two basic options...

* Use a custom action to run custom logic which can modify the existing web site settings. For example, a powershell can be used to modify the default documents setting... 

# ----------------------------------------------------------------
$filter= "system.webserver/defaultdocument/files"
$site= "IIS:\sites\Default Web Site"
$FullPath = "C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\Modules\WebAdministration\WebAdministration.psd1"

Import-Module -Name $FullPath

Add-WebConfiguration $filter "$site" -atIndex 0 -Value @{value="sample00174.html"}
# ----------------------------------------------------------------

* Add custom logic to the install to remove the existing website from the server. Then have the installation install the version of the web site with all the modifications you want to include.