Hi WiX community,
I have a question considering Architectural Design of an Installer rather than explicit WiX usage. I would like to address this question to expert Installer developers and MSI guru’s. We would like to have an installer, actually a set of installers, (preferably pure msi, no exe’s or bootstrappers) that could be initiated via config.xml file. I.e. configuration file (xml format) would have a set of elements and attributes that “describe” what and where we would like to install. For example: InstallPath and a set of features. This will be used mostly in unattended scenarios. This file is supposed to be in the folder along with main setup.msi. For now, if I’m not mistaken, the only way I can read XML file and initialize properties would be the usage of Custom Actions. Our main app is written entirely on .NET platform, so, I guess, managed CustomAction and DTF would be fine. At least I would like to change the INSTALLLOCATION and some other properties (Feature install condition). This approach should be able to update itself using only MajorUpgrade (Bob, thanks for this “syntactic sugar” with this command, it really makes WiX code simplerJ with updates). So, when updates come to happen, new msi’s should read configuration file again for the previous and maybe some changed values (InstallPath could be changed, set of features could be changed, etc.). So the question goes here. Is this approach is good in terms of MSI Design Guidelines. Maybe this whole approach, using CA to “tell” MSI what to do, is an anti-pattern and should be avoided in Production Development. I’ve already created a prototype of this approach and already have issues with property initializations, especially for the Feature conditions. I could not have 100% deterministic behavior during initial install and further upgrades. As an alternate approach I thought of using separate executable that would parse xml file and launch msi’s with corresponding parameters (INSTALLDIR, feature selection), by the way, this approach gives 99,999% probability of successful installations. But still we would like to initiate the process launching only msi file, and no EXE. That’s why I’m addressing this question to WiX community. I guess someone has already encountered this scenario before and has his thoughts of this. For those who didn’t, the conclusions of this topic it could help them in future. So I guess this topic would be valuable to discuss for installer developers. Any advices, ideas and conclusions would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advanced! Tim ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Beautiful is writing same markup. Internet Explorer 9 supports standards for HTML5, CSS3, SVG 1.1, ECMAScript5, and DOM L2 & L3. Spend less time writing and rewriting code and more time creating great experiences on the web. Be a part of the beta today http://p.sf.net/sfu/msIE9-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
