Inventory says that Patch is not available but regedit has the patch.

Question

Hello,
Ours is an HFM 11.1.1.3 and 3 months back we applied HFM 50 patch on it.
Last week when I was applying HFM 500 patch we noticed that when I fired "hpatch lsinventory" it did not had HFM 50 patch in it, but when I saw in the regedit I was able to see HFM 50 patch in it and also I could see HFM 50 patch in HFM client.
Then I tried applying HFM 500 patch but I got error saying pre-requisite HFM 50 patch is not available , so I applied HFM 50 patch again and then applied HFM 500 patch over it.
What I understood is that our inventory might have got created by somebody in our team, but my question is do we have to reapply all the patches every time when we re-create inventory and then try to apply higher version of HFM patch.
Regards,
Rajnish Singh

Answer 1

If you recreate the inventory you will lose the history of installed patches.
If you then need later to install a patch which has a prerequisite patch, you will need to reapply the prerequisites (as you did) before you can proceed with your new patch.
In short, you should not be recreating the inventory except in an emergency (corrupted) situation.
going forward, oracle will be trying to release less smaller Patch Set Exception patches and more complete PSU patches (Patch Set Updates). if you keep up to date with the Patch Set Updates and minor releases, even if an inventory is recreated somewhere along the line, there should not be too many additional patches to be installed.