Setting up an AppLife Update project for automated update creation is easy and straightforward.

The only trick to automation is to ensure your file paths specified in the AppLife Update actions are pointing to files that are properly placed by the automated process.

The command line utility can not change the action properties within your applife update project file. Your automated process builds your appication and places the new files in a folder structure. Your AppLife Update Actions need to point to this build structure. Then at the end of the process, use the command line utility to build and/or publish a new update.

The best file action for automation is the Add & Replace files by comparison action. You can use any of the actions, but this action does not require you to specify any specific file within the AppLife Update project. The action uses a baseline folder along with all built updates newer than that baseline version to determine the files that should be included in the update.

What you do is define a baseline folder that represents your deployed application directory. The specific software version that this folder represents should be the earliest target of the update being built. Then you set up a folder that represents your current software. This is most likely what your automated process maintains.

Drop an Add & Replace files by comparison action into an update project. Point its baseline folder property to the baseline folder you created and set the version of your software that the baseline folder represents. Then point the current version folder to the folder stucture that represents the current software. You can also choose to recurse the entire folder structure or not.

When updates are built, added files and newer files are automatically placed into the update. All you need to do is mainain your current version folder and build updates, all of which can be easily automated.

Remember that the action's Application Directory is not necessarily your deployed Application Directory. The actions application directory is wherever the assembly hosting the Update Controller is located. You might have to move up the directory structure using the subdirectories property to map the directory properly. To illustrate this, here is an example.

The MakeUpdate application is located in {InstallDir}\MakeUpdate\MakeUpdateUI.exe. The baseline and current folder directories reference the {InstallDir} folder, so to map properly, the subdirectory property of the action needs to be set to ..\