Accessing installer package information in WiX Custom bootstrapper UI

Question

I was looking at creating a WiX bundle installer that would provide a checkbox for each of the installers that are contained within the defined chains to allow the user to pick which packages they want to install (similar to the Visual Studio installer). I started down the path of creating a custom bootrapper by extending the BootstrapperApplication and overriding the Run method as I have seen on a couple of blog posts. I do not see anything in the BootStrapperApplication class that provides access to information on the chains and contained packages. Is this information available through the APIs?

Answer 1

The information about which packages and features are included in the bundle is actually available through an XML file that get dropped on the system at runtime. I have a series of blog post that walk through this process with code samples.

Here's an (edited) excerpt that deals with your question:

A lot of information is embedded in the WiX xml files, such as package/feature layout, names, descriptions, ids, etc, which we use to build out our bundle models, but almost none of it is made available at runtime via the event args. However, WiX does generate a BootstrapperApplicationData.xml file which includes a lot of that information and is included in the files available at runtime. We can parse that file at runtime in order to access that metadata, which I suggest you do before you run the detection logic in order to have a populated model to use in the event handlers. Since the file, along with all of our assemblies and .msi files, are placed in a randomly-name temp folder, we can’t know ahead of time where the file will live, so we must use our assembly’s path to find it.

You can then parse the XML to get the metadata. I would suggest running a makeshift installer in debug mode and setting a breakpoint here to inspect the contents of the XML in order to get a full list of what’s available.

The intro post is here: https://www.wrightfully.com/2013/01/part-1-of-writing-your-own-net-based.html

Details in getting the list of packages and features included in the bundle: https://www.wrightfully.com/part-3-of-writing-your-own-net-based-installer-with-wix-context-data/

Details on using that data, along with the user's selection or existing install details, to set which packages/features are installed, removed or upgraded: https://www.wrightfully.com/2013/01/part-4-of-writing-your-own-net-based.html