Hi Jason, Thanks for the input. Perhaps I really am approaching this in the wrong direction. From what I can tell from the Office 2007 installer is they have a bootstrapper and UI bundled into a exe, which invokes MSI's which have no UI. To be honest this would have been the direction I would have gone down if I didn't have to find/create a control which handles the features.
Do you feel this would be the best course of action to take? That way the msi could also be compressed which would reduce our large sql files which are stored as binary objects, It just adds an extra complexity with reinventing UI which currently exists and works perfectly. Thanks, Murray -----Original Message----- Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 11:31:20 -0700 From: Jason Ginchereau <jason...@microsoft.com> Subject: Re: [WiX-users] DTF: Managed Custom Action Dialog. To: "wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net" <wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net> Message-ID: <139942f2536b7c4fbde6b44132f80c84285fce4...@na-exmsg-c111.redmond.corp.m icrosoft.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" I'm not sure you can do what you want to do with a custom action, either managed or unmanaged. At least I've never seen it done. However I'm not at all an expert on installer UI dialogs and events. InstallMessage.ShowDialog is not valid for Session.Message/MsiProcessMessage. It is only used by custom UI handlers (external or embedded). -Jason- -----Original Message----- From: Murray Hipper [mailto:mhip...@snowdengroup.com] Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2009 10:57 PM To: wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [WiX-users] DTF: Managed Custom Action Dialog. Hi Guys, I am trying to overcome the headaches involved with maintaining the dialogs for our MSI solutions and so have looked at the managed code path. While I know some of you will shun me for such a solution, I am merely experimenting with the concept of using managed code to overcome one of our biggest time wasters with MSI installers which is all the dialog screens use to set properties. We have a series of MSI's all which differ slightly from site to site and so I was looking at inheriting winforms and making the tweaks there (removal of properties, addition of properties, etc. Onto the actual problem itself; I have setup a DTF custom action with the dialog class in it which is created and called when run, what I am having trouble with is slotting the custom action into the UI sequence nicely. I wish for it to between the CustomizeDlg and VerifyReadyDlg dialogs. Right now I have a modified WixUI_FeatureTree fragment which I have put in the following code for the customizeDlg Dialog. <Publish Dialog="CustomizeDlg" Control="Next" Event="EndDialog" Value="Return" Order="2">1</Publish> <Publish Dialog="CustomizeDlg" Control="Next" Event="DoAction" Value="CA_ConfigUI" Order="1">1</Publish> The two problems I have is once the 'EndDialog' is sent it immediately begins the installation which I guess makes sense. Second is that I am trying to invoke the session.Message(InstallMessage.ShowDialog, record) method to start up final VerifyReadyDlg but I can find very little information about this wrapper as the MsiProcessMessage API call seems to not mention the Install Message. My other thoughts were to just include a placeholder dialog in between the two which would act as the container for invoking the custom action but again I wanted something a bit more clean. Any ideas on how to cleanly invoke a custom action in the middle of two dialogs (while displaying no dialog boxes on the screen) and how to continue the dialogs once the custom action is complete? Thanks, Murray This e-mail and any attachments to it (the "Communication") are confidential and are for the use only of the intended recipient. The Communication may contain copyright material of the Snowden Group ("Snowden"), or any of its related entities or of third parties. 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