How to use CustomAction in WIX Bundle

burnwixwix3.6

To give you a background – I have a 4 MSI's which comes from our vendor and this has to go to our company servers (we are looking at around 3500 servers). As of now, my counterparts are managing this using vbs, ps1 scripts. But the problem with the script is that everytime an update comes we have to worry about uninstalling the existing package before running the new one and a ton of hardcoding.

I want to automate the whole process (with very less hardcoding) by setting up a WIX script to package all the 4 MSI's together. I read about the WIX bundle and used that to create a single MSI. But now there are lot of a variables to be passed to the 4 MSI's, so I thought of using custom actions to set these variables based on the environment/machine where the MSI is running. But I cant make custom action to work? Am i missing something?

A little bit of googling and I saw something like there are no CustomActions in Bundle? can someone confirm?

Also if there are no CA's what are my options? how can I manipulate the variables to be passed on to the 4 MSI's? Most of them needs to be set based on the machine its being run (like install path, user id's, app pool id's etc).

Best Answer

There is a fourth option, a useful lightweight hack, identified by Vijay Kotecha (see http://vijayskotecha.blogspot.com/2013/07/wix-bootstrapper-custom-action.html),...

Essentially, build an <ExePackage> around a pass-through .bat or .cmd batch file. The batch/command file contains the single line '%*' which re-executes all of the command line arguments as a first class command.

Thus:

<ExePackage ... SourceFile="SourcePath\WixCustomAction.cmd"
    InstallCommand="my_custom_action.exe my_custom_parameters" />
<ExePackage ... SourceFile="SourcePath\WixCustomAction.cmd"
    InstallCommand="my_next_action.exe my_next_parameters" />

Where WixCustomAction.cmd is a file containing only '%*'.

These <ExePackages> can be placed into the <Bundle><Chain> successively as needed using different InstallCommands as needed.

Related Solutions

How to add a WiX custom action that happens only on uninstall (via MSI)

EDIT: Perhaps look at the answer currently immediately below.

This topic has been a headache for long time. I finally figured it out. There are some solutions online, but none of them really works. And of course there is no documentation. So in the chart below there are several properties that are suggested to use and the values they have for various installation scenarios:

alt text

So in my case I wanted a CA that will run only on uninstalls - not upgrades, not repairs or modifies. According to the table above I had to use

<Custom Action='CA_ID' Before='other_CA_ID'>
        (NOT UPGRADINGPRODUCTCODE) AND (REMOVE="ALL")</Custom>

And it worked!

Creating localized WIX 3.6 bootstrappers.

There are several things going on here:

If you use multiple Cultures, you can't use TargetPath in something outside MSBuild that expects a single filename. As you found, TargetPath is a list of the localized files that were built. However, you can use TargetPath if you qualify the .msi package's output language: <MsiPackage SourceFile="$(var.TestMsi.en-US.TargetPath)" Id="MsiEnUs" />
If you want to create one bootstrapper that can install either/both en-US and fr-FR, you'll need to list each .msi package separately in its own MsiPackage element.
If you want to create two bootstrappers, one en-US and one fr-FR, you'll need to invoke the bootstrapper .wixproj twice, once for each language. Bootstrappers don't support the Cultures "trick" -- it's problematic to produce two outputs from a single invocation of MSBuild (witness the TargetPath problem).

If you're using WixStandardBootstrapperApplication, it automatically tries to localize the UI based on the user UI language, falling back to the system UI language, and finally falling back to English. It looks for localized strings in directories named after the LCID, so you'd have payloads like this:

<Payload Name="1033\thm.wxl" SourceFile="..." />
<Payload Name="1036\thm.wxl" SourceFile="..." />

Unfortunately, WixStandardBootstrapperApplication strings are currently available only for en-US. That's why an fr-FR bootstrapper shows UI in English. You'd need to localize the WiX source file HyperlinkTheme.wxl or RtfTheme.wxl (depending on which theme you use). Both of these files are in src\ext\BalExtension\wixstdba\Resources.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to add a WiX custom action that happens only on uninstall (via MSI)

Creating localized WIX 3.6 bootstrappers.

Related Topic