Similarly, what would the recommended approach be for the custom properties values during a maintenance procedure (upgrade, repair, removal, etc...)?
A number of folks seem to simply squirrel the settings off in the registry, then have the installation reg-search the values during maintenance ops. But I've often wondered how they would repair their installation should the registry values A) be modified or B) get totally obliterated. For that, we had decided upon the external UI / bootstrap approach that grabs all the values then generates a transform file that gets applied during installation; relying on Windows Installer to secure the transform and apply it correctly during maintenance ops to get the settings "right". For fun, we also squirrel the settings away in the registry. You should see the grin on my face when internal customers decide they are registry modifying guru's and decide they know better than the install folks, hack the registry to change a setting, then realize the registry setting does nothing. Further, on a repair it gets set back to the original value. The sheer puzzled look on their face is more than satisfying to me <grin/>. Our normal installation process uses this approach [we haven't been bitten (to my knowledge at least) during patching scenarios to date (knock on wood)]. We had looked at the "Office Customization Wizard", then decided to get real funky with an administrative installation's AdminProperties property to accomplish the dirty deed [but this approach was more for 'templat-ing' an installation to be deployed 'similarly' across many machines vs. a new installation, single machine scenario] Is there a general consensus [short of giving WiX to a user :?) ] on what a recommended course of action might be? Moving to an external UI handler to capture silly/trivial/little installation property values to accomplish the transform approach seems like a lot of dev over-kill. [Incidentally, dev's are forced down this path if they need to support multiple instances :( ]. ________________________________________ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Rob Mensching [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2008 11:04 PM To: General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset. Subject: Re: [WiX-users] transform creation 0. Modifying the MSI is not advised since that will mess with the signature. I think MST will have the same problem, but it might not if using the TRANSFORMS property (haven't tried). A tool to generate transforms makes sense (Office used to ship something just like this called "Office Customization Wizard" or something). Patching could get crazy. 1. Properties are the cleanest solution, except for the command-line. You could create your own bootstrapper that modified the way it took input to make this easier. 2. Orca? I've never considered giving that to an user. 3. WiX? I've considered giving that to an user. <grin/> There are a lot of options here... kinda' depends on the specifics of your scenario. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Chris Mumford Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2008 20:57 To: General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset. Subject: [WiX-users] transform creation I just wanted to make sure I'm not doing thing the hard way here. I'm creating an inatallation and I want my customers to be able to modify some its many properties. From what I can see they have the following options: 1. Specify a property on the command line. 2. Use Orca. 3. Use a WiX tool (like torch). These solutions have their problems: 1. Setting lots of properties means a really long command line and it's error prone. 2. Not "normal-user" friendly and huge download. 3. Even less user friendly than #2 since it's a developer tool. So instead I'm writing my own tool to use MSI.DLL to create a new modified MSI and/or MST. I just wanted to check that I'm not doing things the hard way here. Is this the best way to solve this problem? Thanks, Chris ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sponsored by: SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards: VOTE NOW! Studies have shown that voting for your favorite open source project, along with a healthy diet, reduces your potential for chronic lameness and boredom. Vote Now at http://www.sourceforge.net/community/cca08 _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sponsored by: SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards: VOTE NOW! Studies have shown that voting for your favorite open source project, along with a healthy diet, reduces your potential for chronic lameness and boredom. Vote Now at http://www.sourceforge.net/community/cca08 _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sponsored by: SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards: VOTE NOW! Studies have shown that voting for your favorite open source project, along with a healthy diet, reduces your potential for chronic lameness and boredom. Vote Now at http://www.sourceforge.net/community/cca08 _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
