The setting for the Transitive property establishes whether the installer will reevaluate the Condition property for the component containing this registry entry when any product including this component is installed or reinstalled on the target machine. This property is an advanced Microsoft® Windows® installer feature and should be exercised with great care.
As an example, suppose the Condition property for the component containing this registry entry is set to:
VersionNT>=500
In addition, suppose the Transitive property is set to False.
In this example, the Condition property stipulates that the component will not be installed unless the installer determines the target machine operating system is Windows 2000 (formerly called Microsoft® Windows NT® 5.0) or later. The Transitive property set to False stipulates that the installer will not reevaluate the Condition property after the initial component installation.
So, if the installer determines the operating system is Windows 95, it will not install the component containing this registry entry, and it will save the False evaluation of the installation condition. If you then upgrade your operating system to Windows 2000 and install or reinstall this application or any application containing this component, the Windows installer will not reevaluate the VersionNT>=500 condition, and the component will still not be installed or upgraded — even though now it should be.
To avoid this type of error, you can set the Transitive property to True.
Settings
The settings for the Transitive property are:
| Setting | Description |
| False | The Windows installer will only evaluate the Condition property for the component containing this registry entry the first time your product is installed.
If Condition evaluates to The Condition property for the component will not be reevaluated for future installations or reinstallations. Therefore, the component will remain installed or uninstalled, based on the evaluation of the Condition property at initial product installation. |
| True | At every installation or reinstallation of any product including the component that contains this registry entry, the Windows installer will reevaluate the Condition property for the component. The Windows installer will install the component only if the Condition property evaluates to true. |
Remarks
For more information about the Windows installer Transitive property, search for "transitive" in the MSDN™ Library under the topics, Platform SDK, Setup and Systems Management Services, Setup, and Windows Installer Programmer's Reference.