CODEWITHSUNDEEP
wix
Jezz Santos
Jezz Santos

Reputation: 365

How to download a file with WIX

My existing WIX works fine. It allows the user to select a number of features, and when the user proceeds after feature selection, it runs a customaction to install the files using command lines tools. (My features relates one to one with files that just happen to be VSIX files that are installed using VSIXINstaller.exe from the command line customaction). This has been working fine for months, and to date it has included all the files in the installer package itself. The files are first put on disk, and then the command line customaction is run on them locally.

However, my installer has grown quite large to download on its own (because it includes all the feature files that could possibly be installed), and it is preventing people bothering with the download. Becuase most of our users will only select one of the features (not all), what I want to do is host the individual files online somewhere at know URLs, and change the installer so that depending on what features the user selects, download each feature file in turn, save them to the same local folder and run the same cutomaction on them (like before).

So really this is just a change to the installer that already works file when the files are packaged within it. Now instead of having the files within it, they are fetched from a URL first.

Can anyone give me some guidance how to do this?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 4089

Answers (1)

Tom Blodget
Tom Blodget

Reputation: 20802

I'm not sure that you should be using Windows Installer at all but you are benefiting from the feature selection tree. If you are willing to replace that with a custom GUI (e.g., with WinForms or WPF), you could use a WiX Bootstrapper project. It provides for installing ExePackages with downloadable payloads.

You could also split your MSI into one per feature and use those with the bootstrapper.

See this demo, this article and the WiX source code for WiX's bootstrapper.

Upvotes: 1

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