Question

I have a wix project to which I added a custom window that checks the dependencies needed to run the app. This window comes up right after the License Agreement. Everything works fine, the dependencies are checked through custom actions and in case they are not fulfilled hyperlinks to official websites appear if the windows installer is above version5.

In case of a lower version I would like to click on a btn “Show dependencies” and to show the txt file with the links. I have the custom action below that open notepad and the property that contains the file.

Code:

<Property Id="FXDEP" Value="$(sys.CURRENTDIR)\Resources\Files\FxDependencies.txt" />
<Property Id='NOTEPAD'>NOTEPAD.EXE</Property>
<CustomAction Id='LaunchDependencies' Property='NOTEPAD' ExeCommand='[FXDEP]' Return='asyncNoWait' />

The problem is that on the dev machine it works since it finds the path, but on other of course it fails.
How should I tell wix to maintain this file and open it?

I tried putting the file into

<Binary Id="FxDependencies.txt" SourceFile="$(sys.CURRENTDIR)\Resources\Files\FxDependencies.txt" />

but the custom action does not recognize it.

Answer 1

You seem to be trying to open the file that resides in the source of your installation. You use the same values for FxDependencies.txt and FXDEP.

Your text file with dependencies resides in Binary table of the installer, to use it you have to extract it into a temporary directory, and then launch Notepad to display it.

To do it, you would have to write several custom actions:

1. The first CA extract the file into a temporary directory, and saves the path into a property, FXDEPTEMPPATH.
2. The second CA uses FXDEPTEMPPATH to display it in Notepad.

Another option is to write a small application (.exe) that would contain your FxDependencies.txt, in resources for example. You add this .exe into Binary table of MSI, and launch it instead of Notepad from the installer. In this case MSI will automatically extract the exe into a temporary directory and start it. In your application you create a new text file in temporary directory, by extracting the information from resources, and then launch Notepad to display it.

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Edit: There’s a number of ways to read a file from the Binary table. See these links for examples:

• BinaryWrite from Msiext.
• Reading from the Binary Table based on WiX source code.
• Streaming a File from the Binary Table.
• Write the code yourself:
  • Open a database view of the active database with MsiGetActiveDatabase and MsiDatabaseOpenView;
  • Read the binary stream with MsiRecordReadStream.