I'm working on replacing an existing setup procedure with a Wix
installer, and I think I have almost all of the components I need. The
one thing I'm missing however, is a piece of functionality we have in
Installshield that's pretty important to how our applications are
delivered. We have a client application that is published on an
intranet site for a particular customer. The MSI is built once, but
then the install package is customized by creating an SFX file with the
installshield MSI, bootstrapper, and an install.ini file that contains
settings specific to that customer. This allows some information
(server connection parameters etc) to be pre-filled in the installer for
each site, rather than forcing users to know the information ahead of
time.
The approach I've started looking at is to duplicate the installscript
logic using a custom DLL, but I've run into problems with shipping a DLL
alongside the MSI. Evidently if a DLL is launched by an MSI, the
working directory of the DLL (where I'm looking for my settings file) is
NOT the same as the directory of the MSI (which would be the directory
the sfx extracts to). I'm certainly not tied to this solution though,
and I'm wondering if anyone has a better method that would let someone
quickly customize an installer without having to run a compiler on it
(although I've thought of this as an option as well-batch file shortcut
to the WiX compiler/linker with a fragment that sets the relevant
properties).
I'd appreciate any thoughts on how to accomplish this. I know that you
can pass properties in on the command line, and that's the solution I'm
proposing for active directory based installs, but the majority of our
users don't have AD, so we need a way for our deployment guys to quickly
modify these installers for different sites.
Thanks for your suggestions,
Chris
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