2012/3/16 Castro, Edwin G. (Hillsboro) <edwin.cas...@fiserv.com>: > 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 >>
Hi David, Edwin, I'm doing something quite similar to that: On update, a custom action reads out an environment variable and sets the TARGETDIR. Other custom actions modify the transitions used in the UI definitions by re-defining other properties. So this way of reading data from a response file inside a custom action works fine. But make sure to use sensible defaults / popup decent error message if the response file is missing or corrupt. Kind regards, Dirk Räder ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
