I've just started looking at wix again now that it looks like installer projects are going to be deprecated from VisualStudio. We have a third party application that is "install via xcopy", which makes it hard for us to track in terms of versioning so we'd like to create an msi for it. There are several hundred files that are part of the installation.
I'd like to use heat to create the list of files for the installer, but I've heard that it's not good to use heat to create the wxs file more than once with autoguids because then your installer will have issues.
I was wondering if in wix 3.6, there was a command line parameter to heat which would take a previously generated wxs file as the source for guids? I want heat to autogenerate guids for any new files, but use the previous output of heat as a database for existing files.
If you use the -ag flag this will set the guids to be generated at compile time and as long as the path doesn't change the compiler will keep the same guid for each component. Rather than use a command-line to do the harvesting it is better to edit the *.wixproj file and add a HeatDirectory element.
Related
I'm converting our current monolithic installer to use a WiX 3.7 Bundle/chain. We have several components that are now building into their own separately-maintainable MSI installers. My next task is to add all of these to a bootloader/bootchainer, but I've hit a snag.
A requirement for our individual installers is that they contain the version in the filename (i.e. MyApplication-5.4.22.msi). I don't see a tool like Heat for collecting MSI packages together, and I don't see a way to add an MsiPackage element with a wildcard to account for varying package names.
As a last resort, I can wrap the bundler inside of another MSBuild script that will 'autocomplete' the filenames and pass the paths in as variables to the bundler. I'm hoping someone can recommend a solution that works directly in the wxs or wixproj setting.
If the msi files are built with WiX Setup projects, the WiX Bootstrapper project can reference them, thereby creating useful WiX variables that are defined as the paths to the msi files.
See my answer here, as well as the list of variables here.
If that's not the case then you can write some MSBuild targets that run before the Build target to figure out the actual file paths. If the available standard and community MSBuild tasks aren't sufficient, you can write your own tasks, either by creating an assembly or using inline code. (And, of course, there is always the Exec task to shell out to a command-line program like cmd.exe, after which you can parse its output to extract the msi paths.)
I’m writing an MSI for using WiX 3.0 and I’m trying to figure out how to make it include all but some files from a directory without having to manually specify each and every attribute. Similar to a dynamic pickup in installshield.
An old installer I’m looking at for reference (which uses WiX 2.0) does the following:
A makefile to call a script that will copy all the necessary files to a separate directory structure that emulates how the final product should be installed.
another script to insert the attributes for each of the files in this temp folder to a partially completed wxs file.
WiX runs
I want to avoid this step and was wondering if there were some commands or pre-processor directives to achieve this WiX itself?
Also the 1st step above spits out some generated files (from a tool) which is then included into the wxs file. Is there a way I can emulate that as well?
You need to specify each file.
However, you can use Heat.exe to automatically generate a wxs file you can include as part of your build process.
I cheaped out with a non-solution, and zipped up the directory and it's files in the build script. The advantage of your current method is that MSI is aware of the files and they could potentially be key files (and thus patched/upgraded and/or repaired).
I'd look into saschabeaumont's suggestion about using heat. clearly a better solution
I have got the following Problem: In my WiX Setup I need to register a COM Object. I have got a ".tlb" File and a ".dll" File (in my example: XYCommon.dll and a XYCommon.tlb)
Now I want to make the Setup to Register the TLB.
How Can I do this in Windows Installer XML ?
My first try was to work with a CustomAction and Open "Regasm.exe" and Register it - but I dont know how I can bring the Regasm.exe to Register the XYCommon.tlb
Any Help ? Thanks
Use the WiX harvester utility called Heat. It will generate the WiX source that contains the necessary registry entries to correctly register (and unregister) your COM objects.
Will your COM objects (XYCommon.dll and XYCommon.tlb) change often?
If no: then just run Heat on those two files (read up on the command-line parameters and experiment with them to get the desired output), clean them up if necessary, and add them to your project.
If yes:
If you want to try to run Heat as a Visual Studio prebuild event, this SO answer should give you some guidance: Add a folder to installer in wix not files?
Sometimes when you use Heat you still need to tweak then generated .wxs files a little. Therefore you may want to write some wrapper utility that calls heat on a list of files or a directory, then cleans up the output how you would like. Then you can add the utility to your build process.
Example of using heat on an individual file:
heat.exe file myFile.dll -gg -g1 -suid -svb6 -out myFile.wxs
Example of using heat on an entire directory:
heat.exe dir myDirectory -gg -g1 -suid -svb6 -out myDirectory.wxs
Breakdown of some of the parameters I used:
heat.exe: you'll have to specify the full path to the executable if it's not in your path
file myFile.dll: specify that you want to run heat on the single file, myFile.dll
dir myDirectory: specify that you want to run heat on the directory, myDirectory
gg: generate guids for the components
g1: generate guids without the curly braces
suid: suppress creating uniquely generated ids for files and components, instead use the file names as the ids
svb6: suppress harvesting COM information for the VB6 runtime. Note: If you want to register COM objects that use the VB6 runtime, you need to use this flag so that you do not overwrite your VB6 runtime registry entries
My installer has to copy files into installdir... My application has around 2000 files and it is not possible for me to write the script to add each and every file to the installer.
Is there any option in wix so that I can add all the files or the entire folder consisting the files at once? I am new to wix and i didnt find any option in any tutorial for this... Please do assist me and thanks in advance.....
Heat is the WiX harvest tool. You can run it on a directory to generate the necessary WiX source code.
EDIT:
If you want to run heat before your VS project builds, add it to your project prebuild events as seen in the screenshot below (this is how I have my project setup to dynamically generate WiX source for our ever changing help content):
Note the -var wix.HelpSource switch that I have. The WiX source files generated by heat will set the location of the source files to that variable instead of hard-coding it. So the generated source will have components that look something like this:
<Component Id="Welcome.htm" Directory="Content" Guid="INSERT-GUID-HERE">
<File Id="Welcome.htm" KeyPath="yes" Source="!(wix.HelpSource)\Content\Welcome.htm" />
</Component>
And in my particular case, I define that variable on the Tool Settings screen of my WiX VS project to the relative directory ..\..\Help\Output as seen below:
NOTE: Harvesting files in this manner will cause the GUIDs of the components harvested to change every time you build. If you don't want your GUIDs to change, you may have to write some wrapper that calls heat to harvest the files, then updates your original WiX source, leaving all the GUIDs alone.
If this is a repeat question, please direct me to the existing solution. I wasn't able to find a matching query.
We currently use InstallShield. I'm attempting to covert a project with 407 files to a WiX3 installation package. I tried using heat.exe to do some of the automation but I get the following warning for almost every file:
c:> heat dir "c:\projectDir\projectA" -gg -ke -template:Product -out "c:\install\projectA\heatOutput"
heat.exe: warning HEAT5150 : Could not harvest data from a file that was expected to be a SelfReg DLL: c:\projectDir\projectA\plugin1.dll. If this file does not support SelfReg you can ignore this warning. Otherwise, this error detail may be helpful to diagnose the failure: Unable to load file: c:\projectDir\projectA\plugin1.dll, error: 126.
Q: Is it normal for this warning to be reported for every file?
If there's a current "How To create/convert to your first WiX install project with many files" tutorial, please point me to it. The key requirement is "with many files".
PS. I know that WiX is designed for incremental install project creation but it would be nice to know if there's an automated way to convert existing install projects.
If there's a current "How To
create/convert to your first WiX
install project with many files"
tutorial, please point me to it. The
key requirement is "with many files"
You can take the msi file generated with installshield, and then decompile it with the dark.exe tool which comes with wix. As you can see in this diagram, dark.exe generates wxs files from a msi file.
You can use it like this:
dark installer.msi decompiled.wxs
See dark /? for more information.
edit: I don't use Votive, but AFAIK it should be able to handle the wxs files generated by dark. Did Votive show you an error?
edit2: wixproj files are just for visual studio and msbuild integration. The core tools don't know or use this format. Simply create a blank wixproj and add the wxs file to it from visual studio.
edit3: You should not compare the size of the wxs file to the msi file size. Like an installshield project file, a wxs does not contain the files to install. It only references them. Your installshield project file is not 70MB large either. If you want to extract the binary files from the MSI, then you should use dark.exe with the -x <path> switch.
Are you trying to extract data from x64 DLL's? That doesn't really work...