I haven't had time to do this yet but I'll throw it over the wall and see if anybody likes it as an idea.
In my case, all of the data we might want to customize on a per-site basis is exposed via public properties. I just need to provide the correct set of command line arguments, one for each customized public property. I considered creating transforms to customize the values of these properties allowing each site to generate their own transform but the process for generating a transform seem rather difficult to me as you need the base package and the end-result package to generate the transform.... I often ask myself, if I have to create an end-result package anyway, then why not just use it directly? Anyway, it makes a lot of sense in my case to build custom action that knows how to parse an XML file (or some other data format) that can be specified on the command line (similar to the TRANSFORMS property). The custom action would need to run early enough to customize public properties before the rest of the actions in the various sequences. I haven't looked into building this yet for our deployments because we already have scripts that generate the appropriate command lines for us. I have not use burn yet but would love to see something similar to this available out-of-the-box without requiring a custom BA (I think that is what is required today for a burn generated bootstrapper). Edwin G. Castro Software Developer - Staff Digital Channels Fiserv Office: 503-746-0643 Fax: 503-617-0291 www.fiserv.com Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail > -----Original Message----- > From: David Cramlet [mailto:decram...@gmail.com] > Sent: Friday, March 16, 2012 11:41 AM > To: wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net > Subject: [WiX-users] User-Friendly Site-Specific Installation > > This may be more of a general Windows Installer question than a WiX > question. > > I have a deployment group asking if there is any way to make site-specific > installation any easier than the "msiexec command-line magic" or "Orca > voodoo" that transforms seem to require. Notably, this is for sites that are > not using GPO-style deployment, since Windows takes care of applying the > transforms in that case. > > After some initial research, I am beginning to think the only other options > would be a transform-aware bootstrapper, or just building a custom MSI for > each site. > > Since they always have exactly one transform for the product in question, > the first thing I (perhaps foolishly) tried was adding the TRANSFORMS > property to the Property table of the MSI, with a value along the lines of > "@SiteSpecific.mst" (with such an MST in the same folder as the MSI). As you > might expect, this (and various variations > thereof) had no discernible effect. > > Any thoughts would be much appreciated. > > Thank you, > David Cramlet > decram...@gmail.com > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > This SF email is sponsosred by: > Try Windows Azure free for 90 days Click Here http://p.sf.net/sfu/sfd2d- > msazure _______________________________________________ > WiX-users mailing list > WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF email is sponsosred by: Try Windows Azure free for 90 days Click Here http://p.sf.net/sfu/sfd2d-msazure _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
