Sajo Jacob

WiX tools, Logging and Silent installation

Some useful WiX tools and Windows installer notes:

WiXEdit

WiXEdit is a decent WiX editor (open source). I used it extensively during the initial UI design phases, it works for most purposes but don’t expect it to be very intuitive like for example when it comes to Attribute on controls its shows all possible attributes on right clicking the control instead of showing only the applicable ones.

Votive (the visual studio plugin)

You can use Votive to use Visual Studio to build your WiX code.

Remember you won’t be able to see the dialogs in design mode if you are using Votive. Only advantage here would be you could use visual studio’s intellisense for the WiX code after you copy the WiX XSD’s from WiX\doc  to the following directory: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Xml\Schemas and ofcourse you could integrate it with your project or as a separate build process

I personally use a batch file to build my WiX project mainly because it’s easier to point to different releases of WiX binaries without having to install Votive each time and also with some custom actions you might want to perform when building your project.

Orca Editor

I use this tool for peaking into the msi files, it also lets you edit the .msi or.msm file directly.

To install and run the Orca editor, follow these steps:

Tallow

This tool is used to generate WiX fragments by harvesting a directory with WiX2.0

Heat

Similar functionality as in Tallow but Heat is optimized for working with WiX 3.0.

Keep in mind that both Heat and Tallow are designed to allow a setup author to generate their setup authoring very quickly for the first time after which authoring should be done manually to make sure that guids, identifier names remain the same and component rules aren’t broken

Dark

Dark is used to reverse engineer an MSI into a WiX source file

Install your installation package with logging:

Silent Install with selective feature installation and logging:

WiX and Databases

Since WiX is still fairly new and is an Open Source project, don’t be surprised if you hear a lot of noise about the little or no documentation available .

In this and the coming few posts I am going to start posting some of the challenges/ roadblocks I’ve hit and the workarounds or solutions I could find.

Let’s look at how to perform some simple tasks with databases first and then try the more complex ones.

First thing to get started would be to add a WiX SQLExtension and UtilExtension. To use any extension with WiX you will have to include a reference to the schema within the WiX element.

 <util:User Id="MySQLUser" Name ="[SQLUser]" Password="[SQLPassword]"/>

Create a SQL Database:

Create a SQL Database and run some custom sqlscripts:

<sql:SqlDatabase Id="MySqlDatabase" Database="MyDatabase" Server="[SQLSERVER]" Instance="SQLEXPRESS"   CreateOnInstall="yes" DropOnUninstall="yes" User="MySQLUser" ContinueOnError="yes"/>

</sql:SqlDatabase>

Recently I had to restore a database from an mdf/ldf from WiX, sounds pretty straightforward right? WiX actually does pretty well to make it straightforward (only if you knew the magic words).

Since I spent a few man hours on a workaround with what I had and did manage to avoid using VBScripts, I am going to post that here too; here is what I did:

So all we know until now is how to create a new database and run custom sql scripts, what we need to do is to create a database at a user specified location and restore the database from a mdf/ldf which is on the CD(final product).

You can create the database at the user specified location as shown above. You can also move the mdf/ldf to a location that the user desires.  The problem comes when you want to do an attach command from a sql script. How does your sql script know where the mdf/ldf were moved to?

1) To begin with,  I manually created a .bak file from the mdf/ldf and copied that to the project folder.

2)  Then I went ahead and created a new database from WiX at the location where the user desired and also specified where to place the mdf/ldf on the target machine (and the names) as shown in the last example above.

3) And then finally ran this sql script from WiX to search for the physical location (filename) of the mdf/ldf that was created from WiX and then replace them using a Restore command.

WiX support for doing something like this is by letting you write Inline sql statements by using the SQL attribute on SqlString element

If you have a readonly mdf/ldf then a restore can result in a readonly database, so assuming that is the case here, let’s perform a set operation after the restore. Sequence attribute here helps with the order of execution.

Just take off the User attribute in the SqlDatabase element we had earlier in the database creation section and it will use Windows Authentication.