Christopher Painter wrote: > > InstallShield's custom action sets a property but there's no reason you > have to use that property. You can write your own custom action setting > your own property then tell the IIS custom actions to use that property > instead. > > All said and done, InstallShield 2011 *currently* trumps WiX in IIS > support IMO. This may balance out once WiX 3.5 ships. > > BTW, I think I recall this registry value you mention can't be trusted. > It's set one time during the installation of IIS and doesn't always > reflect the current document directory for the default root website. The > only authoratative way I know is to call into IIS's API and ask it what > the document directory is. > > BTW, I wouldn't write a custom action to "fix" it since it's not your > registry resource that you are messing with. > > Christopher Painter, Author of Deployment Engineering Blog > Have a hot tip, know a secret or read a really good thread that deserves > attention? E-Mail Me > The InstallShield custom action I was describing creates IIS virtual directories and applications. This uses some proprietary InstallShield DLL that crashed if the PathWWWRoot registry entry contained an environment reference (specifically, %SystemDrive%) because the environment variable was REG_SZ instead of REG_EXPAND_SZ (Microsoft's mistake, not InstallShield). We saw this failure in the MSI logs and I.S. was definitely reading this variable, so I assumed that, if it's good enough for InstallShield, it's good enough for us.
Manually editing the registry and replacing %SystemDrive% with C: in the registry value prevented the InstallShield custom action from cratering the install. So we did that in a wrapper that was invoked at the start of the install, and restored the registry variable from a cached location at the end of the install. We sent a test case to InstallShield and they reproduced the problem but said it wouldn't be fixed until a future version was released. Unless the WiX IIS tooling doesn't use this variable, I'd imagine that this will also be a problem for the WiX custom action unless it calls ExpandEnvironmentStrings() on the value. If that's the case, I hope it gets tested on each Windows platform. :-) Anyway, after that InstallShield frustration, we developed our own IIS registration tooling in C# but it's not invoked via custom actions until the install is complete and all the files are present. I currently need a property that is set earlier and allows us to install the HTML and ISAPI files into the web tree. We do not want to install them into C:\Program Files because that directory is sacrosanct and our customers will want to modify these web files. Putting the files into something like c:\Program Files\Common Files or "All Users" is doable but it's easier to explain if the files are dropped into the WWW tree and that also avoids permission issues. I do think you're right about the PathWWWRoot variable -- if the "Default Web Site" is moved, the PathWWWRoot registry entry might not track it. So I'll have to bite the bullet and code yet another a custom action that queries the IIS metabase directly and sets the property. I did spend some time over the last week experimenting with the WiX 3.5 IIS configuration feature. It looks promising but I could NOT figure out how to get it to set an MSI property that indicated where a physical directory for a WebDirectoryor VirtualWebDirectorywas located. So I backed out those changes. But if someone has figured this out, please share! -- View this message in context: http://windows-installer-xml-wix-toolset.687559.n2.nabble.com/Creating-Virtual-Directories-in-c-inetpub-wwwroot-in-WiX-tp688976p5887358.html Sent from the wix-users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Learn how Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) One Node allows customers to consolidate database storage, standardize their database environment, and, should the need arise, upgrade to a full multi-node Oracle RAC database without downtime or disruption http://p.sf.net/sfu/oracle-sfdevnl _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
