Difference Between Self Heal and Repair

Self Heal and Repair are two different concepts in Windows Installer which people many times consider to be the same thing, however there is difference in these two.

Self Heal is triggered by advertised shortcuts, or other advertising information in the package which eventually Repairs the application.

When the application is launched by advertised shortcut, it checks for all the key paths of the Current Feature, if any of the key paths is missing it will launch Repair.

Note that if there are multiple features then it will not check the missing key paths of the other features, but only the feature of which the advertised shortcut is launched.

Repair of an MSI can be triggered by

• Repair from  Add/Remove programs
• Command -     msiexec /f{other option} {MSI path}
• Self Heal by advertised shortcut or other advertising information.
• Active setup

Once the repair of the package is triggered then the whole of the MSI is reinstalled by which I mean, all its features are reinstalled.