Question

I am building a Wix installer that is based on a set of auto-generated XML files (I use HEAT to harvest folder content). I need to exclude certain files from a resulting XML, for example, from this fragment I want to exclude a file “Web.config”:

<Component Id="cmp87E809324190AF5E85315B10C397DB8F" 
           Directory="Content" 
           Guid="{4210C091-E16F-45EA-9005-A7487CF6AC69}">
   <File Id="fil13DABBB8A7FACF8E81FE69FD2464DE48" 
         Source="$(var.ProjectDir)\MyService.svc" />
</Component>
<Component Id="cmp276C007DCB38D3C2E4DA41DFDD8F5CED" 
           Directory="Content" 
           Guid="{A01BE50E-3B00-40EF-96EB-D48AED1F6259}">
   <File Id="fil527A2DD913A88F35BD2B90F10029FB32" 
         Source="$(var.ProjectDir)\Web.config" />
</Component>

I apply the following transformation:

  <!-- Identity template -->
  <xsl:template match="@* | node()">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="@* | node()" />
    </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>

  <!-- exclude files -->
  <xsl:template match="wix:Component/wix:File[
                          @Source='$(var.ProjectDir)\Web.config'
                       ]">
  </xsl:template>

Unfortunately it only removes the “File” element (the one it matches), I would like to remove the parent element (“Component”) for the matched “File” sub-element. This must be relatively easy in XSLT, but I haven’t figured it out.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You should use:

<!-- exclude files -->
<xsl:template match="
        Component[File/@Source='$(var.ProjectDir)\Web.config']"/>

Namespaces are missing in your sample XML, so you can add them yourself.