Is it possible to create a wix installer (msi) that offers the user the choice of installing the target product as either full or portable (i.e. non-installed, running from a thumb drive, for example) using the predefined wix controls?
As far as I searched, the feature property (minimal, typical, full...etc.) is irrelevant in this context. The only solution I can think of is adding a custom UI form element that displays the choice of full & portable installation as radio buttons. Based on the choice of the user, with the help of "if clause", the msi package will either perform a full installation with shortcuts and registry entries, or it will simply copy the source files to the destination directory.
Note after edit: As a third option, is it a better (or more common) alternative to supply a simple zip file for portable installation and a proper msi file for full installation?
Your third option (a zip file) is good. A similar option would be to package with a PortableApps.com installer.
It is not possible to use Windows Installer to "simply copy the source files to the destination directory." Windows Installer manages installations and provides repair and uninstall support--those features are not optional (though you could hack around them). A successful installation would do more than copy files and a proper failed installation would undo everything it had done.
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Inside our .NET Framework 4.6.2 solution; we have a WiX project responsible for generating the .msi installer package for our WPF application.
The generated .msi installs fine on my machine, but not on colleague's computer.
After investigating for a couple of hours, we concluded that it was because of the nature of the D:\ drive on my colleague's computer.
The .msi was being run from an alias hard drive. He created the alias by following instructions here. So an alias drive is just a regular folder on C:\ but you turn that into an alias hard drive.
When the .msi is run from outside the aliased drive, the program installs without any problems, otherwise he gets these errors:
Clicking Retry doesn't do anything, but clicking cancel gives the following:
On my machine, I don't have any alias hard drives set up, and things just work, in other words, the program installs without any issues.
How do we get the installer to work with alias drives too?
This isn't supported by Windows Installer. The alias created by Subst only exists in the user profile that created it. MSI runs as SYSTEM and can't see it.
Subst Considered Harmlessly Useless: Yes, as Chris states we have both seen this before. MSI is an old girl, and newer Windows features or old ones that are weird cause such problems.
Workaround: In the realm of workarounds, maybe check features and / or transforms:
Optional Features: what is this D:\ drive? Is it his personal data storage? Are you installing files into "My Documents" or something like that? It you make a separate feature for the components going into the D:\ drive and then unselect that feature from installation, does it then install? (albeit with a few missing files). Screen shot of feature selection.
Transforms: There are also other ways to achieve the suppression of features and files from installing. You can use transforms - little database fragments - to apply runtime changes to a running MSI installer. More on transforms here. Shorter version here. And just one more.
Administrative Installation: You can (also) get hold of the missing files from another computer, or maybe by running an administrative installation of the MSI: What is the purpose of administrative installation initiated using msiexec /a? (glorified file extraction).
Copying of license files using Wix 3.10.2? We have a requirement where we need copy some license files after the installation of the webapplication to IIS. Copying of license files will be the last in the sequence. The license files will reside next to the burn (bootstrapper) setup.exe. This way we can control what license file need to be installed based on the user. I am trying to understand if there will be an issue with number of license files reside along with .exe? Is there a custom action to pick files that are not part of the msi or exe?
1) There will not be an issue with number of license files residing along with exe
2) Using the Media element without a Cabinet name you can specify that certain files will neither be inside a cab or embedded into the msi, no custom action needed. See http://wixtoolset.org/documentation/manual/v3/xsd/wix/media.html
You may need to be more precise about exactly when you want the copy to occur. Your original question says "after the installation" which implies that the install has finished and that your generated MSI is no longer running. but in a later comment you say "during the install".
If after the install is what you want, then you could add a custom executable to your Burn bundle that will do whatever you want. In many of these kinds of situations the application that needs the file just goes and gets it with help from the MSI saying where it was installed from, or by using the SourceList capabilities of Windows Installer to get the location.
If you want to copy files during the install then the CopyFile element is probably what you need. It has wildcard capability to define the files you want to copy. Your source location will be the SourceDir property and the destination will be one of your defined directories. Note that the files will not be uninstalled when the product is uninstalled.
WiX Copyfile:
http://wixtoolset.org/documentation/manual/v3/xsd/wix/copyfile.html
I had to use native bootstrap that comes with Visual Studio SDK. With the bootstrap you can also create pre-requisite like installing .net. This worked for my requirement. Also there is a msbuild task so that you can automate it. Used setup project to create msi and VS bootstrap to create setup.exe
I want to make a MSI installation using WiX and EmbeddedGUI. I really want to make it highly modular - ie the main MSI will contain only the basic files (the required ones), and all other features will be split into separate MSI files, which will be downloaded from internet if not present on hard drive and installed only if selected in my EmbeddedGUI.
But I am totally new to WiX, and I can't find a way to actually how to make that modules? MS Office and MS Visual Studio seems to be using this scheme, by using the modules which it downloads over internet and installs them in case of need - something like this:
It seems that Fragments is mostly like "static libraries", not "dynamic libraries" which would be more useful in such a situation. There is also the Chaining mechanism, but I'm not sure I will be able to bundle the features as the same application (only one entry in "Install/Delete" window) because it seems to be calling external MSIs completely separately (more like invoking "separate exes" instead of loading "dynamic libraries").
So, what is the way to go for making a highly modular setup package with WiX?
Use a bundle (chain). The Burn engine, which manages bundles, will show only the bundle in Add/Remove Programs and can download any packages that aren't already present -- for example, using the MsiPackage/#DownloadURL attribute.
Suppose that you have an installer (not a wix installer) that you downloaded from somewhere. How can you know UpgradeCode of that installer so that you can fill it in in the UpgradeCode section in the new installer that you prepare?
Can I learn it from registry somehow? So the question is basically, how to know the UpgradeCode of a program that is installed in the computer.
Actually my problem is that my product has been installed with another installer and I am now trying to move it to wix installer. However, I can't find upgrade code in previous installer and I want to find it from installed software.
Thanks.
As I posted to WiX users:
I've seen this done by having the upgrade get the uninstall string from the registry, where there should be a command you can use since it's not MSI-based. Whether you should call it in the UI sequence or the execute sequence or both depends on your requirements for silent installs, meaning that you'd need to do it silently in the execute sequence, and perhaps need to alter the uninstall command to make it silent.
The same general idea should work if that install has a standard uninstall shortcut you could get the command from. Either way, you're just using a CA to run an external program, or maybe a Util
CAQuietExec kind of thing.
Assuming it's a Windows Installer based installer ( WiX, InstallShield, et al ) you can edit it with ORCA and look at the Property table to see it's UpgradeCode. You may have to first extract it if it was packaged as a self extracting installer.
You can also query the MSI API or look in the registry (HKCR\Installer) for this information. If you go the registry route it's probably easiest to look at the Products/GUID/Sourcelist key and trace it back to a cached MSI and look at it in ORCA. Otherwise you have to learn how to join different datasets and convert Darwin transformed GUIDS back to their original GUID format.
Fire up PowerShell (run as admin) and run this command to get a list of installed products with product code:
Get-WmiObject Win32_Product | Format-Table Name, LocalPackage
You will get a list of all installed MSI products, and a weird looking path to the local cached MSI database. It normally looks something like this:
C:\Windows\Installer\235bbf8.msi
The 235bbf8.msi file name is random, and will be different for each installed product. It is a cached copy of the MSI file that you originally installed. It does not contain cab files (or at least it didn't in older versions of Windows).
You can open that file with the random name from Orca by chosing File -> Open and then pasting in the full path to the file open dialog, and then pressing open. Don't make any changes but check the upgrade code in the Property table. You can also use other MSI tools such as Installshield.
Note that the path C:\Windows\Installer is "super protected" and is not even visible in Windows Explorer before you enable the show hidden folders AND you disable the protect operating system files option. I still believe you can open the file directly if you paste the whole path into Orca - no need to go via Windows Explorer.
My existing WIX works fine. It allows the user to select a number of features, and when the user proceeds after feature selection, it runs a customaction to install the files using command lines tools. (My features relates one to one with files that just happen to be VSIX files that are installed using VSIXINstaller.exe from the command line customaction).
This has been working fine for months, and to date it has included all the files in the installer package itself. The files are first put on disk, and then the command line customaction is run on them locally.
However, my installer has grown quite large to download on its own (because it includes all the feature files that could possibly be installed), and it is preventing people bothering with the download. Becuase most of our users will only select one of the features (not all), what I want to do is host the individual files online somewhere at know URLs, and change the installer so that depending on what features the user selects, download each feature file in turn, save them to the same local folder and run the same cutomaction on them (like before).
So really this is just a change to the installer that already works file when the files are packaged within it. Now instead of having the files within it, they are fetched from a URL first.
Can anyone give me some guidance how to do this?
I'm not sure that you should be using Windows Installer at all but you are benefiting from the feature selection tree. If you are willing to replace that with a custom GUI (e.g., with WinForms or WPF), you could use a WiX Bootstrapper project. It provides for installing ExePackages with downloadable payloads.
You could also split your MSI into one per feature and use those with the bootstrapper.
See this demo, this article and the WiX source code for WiX's bootstrapper.