Hi Neil, This would definitely be a welcome addition to the WiX toolset; and would be great if you could help make it happen.
For installs targeting IIS6 my view is that the hashed id should be the default behaviour - but also supporting specification of an explicit identifier would give alot of flexibility too. Good luck. Cheers, Andrew -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Neil Sleightholm Sent: Wednesday, 11 June 2008 5:57 AM To: WiX Users Subject: [WiX-users] IIS Website Identifier / Site Id When you use WiX to create a new website in IIS 6 it creates it with an Identifier or Site Id of one more than the last website that was created (this is the same as IIS 5). If you create it manually then IIS sets the Identifier to a number based on the hash of the site name - the algorithm for this is explained here on Mike Poulson's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/mpoulson/archive/2006/03/06/544893.aspx. To summarise it creates the hash and then if that Identifier is in use it just adds one until it finds an unused Identifier. This method of creating Identifier's based on the hash of the name is very useful when you have a farm of servers as it means that the Identifier is not dependent on the order in which installs are run. For in house websites you can arrange for the website names to have unique hash values and be sure that all servers in a farm are identical and even build servers with a subset of the sites that again are identical to the original install. The identifier is also used for log file path, so on a farm of servers it helps if the logs are all in known folders. Now to my point, would it be possible to get this functionality built into WiX v3? A company I work for has already done it for WiX v2 but the approach was to simply change the IIS site creation code to use the hashing method. I suspect this is not the best approach to this but as we only target IIS 6 servers it hasn't caused a problem. I am happy to share this code (it is a change to scaweb.cpp) and to try to implement it in WiX v3 but I would like to know what other people think about it and how best to approach it. Here are some of the issues I see: 1. Should this value be automatically generated by the install? 2. Should it be possible to override the identifier value in WiX when creating a site? 3. Should the default be the hashing method on IIS 6? 4. I haven't used IIS 7, does it use the same hashing scheme? Neil Neil Sleightholm X2 Systems Limited [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://sourceforge.net/services/buy/index.php _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://sourceforge.net/services/buy/index.php _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
