WiX bundle UI - selectable product tree

I have recently migrated 7 application installers to WiX. The old installer (10+ years old technology, the UI looks like a windows 3.1 setup) already had a product tree in its bundle installer, where I could select which product to install.

I have got to the point where I have a working bundle installer with all 7 products installing fine. But I need to be able to select which products will be installed from the whole bundle.

I understand that this is a bootstrapper UI issue. I will need to write my own bootstrapper in C# if I wand to have this tree. Unfortunately this seems to be a bigger project than what the whole thing worths. So my questions are:

• Is there an easy way to bundle multiple MSI installers together in a bootstrapper, that installs them one after the other, and has a selectable product tree? (I need a free product.)
• Does anyone have a working sample code for such a bootstrapp开发者_Go百科er for WiX?

Thanks in advance!

Is there an easy way to bundle multiple MSI installers together in a bootstrapper, that installs them one after the other, and has a selectable product tree?

Yes, some commercial setup authoring tools offer support for this.

I need a free product.

I don't think there is a free product which supports this. You could try using the WiX bootstrapper to add your packages as prerequisites, but I'm not sure if this meets your requirements.

Does anyone have a working sample code for such a bootstrapper for WiX?

Bootstrappers are usually specialized. Either it's a generic bootstrapper which handles some prerequisites or its a custom bootstrapper which handles specific tasks.

You have a very specific task, so it's very unlikely you will find an already created bootstrapper for this.

Either you write your own bootstrapper which shows the UI you want and installs the packages you need, or use a different tool which supports this.

I am working on this very same issue. My solution is to describe my feature tree in an xml file and have the xml parsed by the custom ba on startup. You can then construct your tree with the appropriate controls to select/deselect features and set Burn variables appropriately. One obstacle I've encountered thus far is that Burn variables don't seem to be evaluated in the InstallCondtion attribute for the packages, but I have a couple of work-arounds in mind for that--think it's a burn bug as Wix 3.6 is still beta.