Question

I have a WIX installer and I am trying to work out what this line is actually doing (attached to the next button on my WIX dialog).

<Publish Event="EndDialog" Value="Return" >1</Publish>

It seems to me that this line means we are handing control back to the installer after showing our custom dialogs. But how does it then know which dialog to display next. It should in my case be showing the dialog indicating installation progress, but it jumps to the wrong dialog.

If I change it to this (ProgressDlg is the dialog showing installation progress in the WixUI_Minimal UI set which is the one I actually want to jump to),

<Publish Event="NewDialog" Value="ProgressDlg" >1</Publish>

It throws an error when I try to install

Answer 1

OK, I seem to have stumbled across something that now works, but I don’t really understand why. Comments would be appreciated.

I have this dialog sequence,

WelcomeEulaDlg (part of WixUI_Minimal)
CustomInstall
StartAutomaticallyUI
IC3DatabaseSelection
GSDatabaseSelectionUI
ProgressDlg (part of WixUI_Minimal)

So basically I have created 4 dialogs that come between the EULA and installation progress dialog.

I had those dialogs inside an InstallUISequence block so that using orca would show those dialogs within the InstallUISequence table.

This seemed to be my issue. As soon as I removed the dialogs from the block and only had the first dialog in the block (which is CustomInstall) it worked fine.

Now it looks like this, whereas before that table had all the other dialogs

<InstallUISequence>
  <Show Dialog="CustomInstall" After="WelcomeEulaDlg" >NOT Installed</Show>
</InstallUISequence>

The way I link those dialogs together and made them all included was just by linking the next and back buttons together. They didn’t need to be in the InstallUISequence.

I got this idea from using the WixAware demo and creating a project in there.