You may want to look at Paraffin
(http://www.wintellect.com/CS/blogs/jrobbins/archive/2007/10/21/wix-a-better-tallow-paraffin.aspx).
This tool was designed for WiX 2.0, so you have to WiXCop the resulting file
if you use WiX 3.0. Paraffin handles much of the GUID generation and updating
for you. For maintaining large directories of non-binary files where additions
and removals are common, this tool works very well for me. I just wish it
generated WiX 3.0 code....
Jason Swager
----- Original Message ----
From: Neil Enns <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset.
<wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net>
Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2008 11:01:30 PM
Subject: [WiX-users] Automating the inclusion of a mess of files
My application will wind up shipping with a ton of loose resource files on
disk*. We will have several items with the following well-defined structure:
MyFile1.foo
MyFile1_files
\ 0
\ somefile.txt
\ 1
\ somefile.txt
...
\ 9
\ somefile.txt
This is how the files live on disk as source, and how we need them to live on
disk on the target machine. As you can imagine, I have no desire to author the
WiX to install these suckers by hand, especially since they're going to change
relatively often between now and when we ship. I want to automate the process
somehow.
I started tonight by thinking a custom extension would do. My plan was to
create a new <MyFile> element that took the root .foo file, then would
automatically add all the necessary entries into the MSI for all the files and
subdirectories. I got a custom extension up and running pretty quickly, but
when it came time to actually think about adding the things to the MSI this
approach seemed, well, insane. I have no desire to recreate what the <File>,
<Directory>, and <Component> elements do in code.
My new alternate approach is to do this via a custom MSBuild task that runs
before Candle and generates a WiX file that then gets added to the list of
things to compile.
Anyone have any other suggestions for good ways to automate this?
Thanks,
Neil
* Don't ask why we have this structure and why they are loose files. It's a
very long story best told over a frosty beverage.
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