Summary

Symptoms

When building an InstallShield project, the following warning may occur:

Warning -5061: The file name [FILENAME] already exists. Use the feature?s Source Location property to prevent this error.

[FILENAME] contains the fully qualified path to the file generating this warning message.

Cause

This warning message occurs when two or more files with the same file name are included in multiple features of a project or merge module. Because this is a warning, it will not negatively affect your project. For example, including Microsoft's XML 4.0 merge module in a project triggers this warning because this merge module includes the files msxml4.dll and msxml4r.dll in multiple components.

This error occurs each additional time the file is included. So, if myfile.dll is included three times in your project, this error occurs twice.

Resolution

Typically, this issue can be resolved by modifying the Source Location property. The Source Location property allows you to create unique folders for each component's files, which is necessary if you have two or more files with the same filename in more than one component. However, the Source Location property is not available in InstallShield Express, so this warning can be ignored this warning and the build process continued. This warning will not negatively affect the setup.

Additional Information

This error is briefly documented in the InstallShield Help Library topic Build Errors and Warnings.