combo box selection property change

Question

I am writing an installer for an application. As part of that I am required to get the country name the user selects. If the user selects United States, I want the value US in my program, i.e. 2 letter code.

Currently I implemented the combo box like this:

<Control Id="CountryList" Type="ComboBox" Sorted="yes" ComboList="yes" Property="COUNTRY" X="30" Y="118" Width="150" Height="15">
  <ComboBox Property="COUNTRY">
     <ListItem Value="United States" />
     <ListItem Value="India" />
     <ListItem Value="Australia" />
     <ListItem Value="United Kingdom" />
  </ComboBox>
</Control>

Can anyone please suggest me how to change the property COUNTRY to US or IN or UK etc. I mean 2 letter code.

Also I have to add all possible countries. Any better way to accomplish this?

Related to this, I want the first combobox to list all the countries. The second combobox can then show the states that belong to the country. :)

Answer 1

Use the Text attribute for a visible text, and Value attribute for the value to be put into the ComboBox property when the item is selected:

<Control Id="CountryList" Type="ComboBox" Sorted="yes" ComboList="yes" Property="COUNTRY" X="30" Y="118" Width="150" Height="15">
  <ComboBox Property="COUNTRY">
    <ListItem Text="United States" Value="US" />
    <ListItem Text="United Kingdom" Value="UK" />
    ...
  </ComboBox>
</Control>

As for your other questions:

Also I have to add all possible countries. Any better way to accomplish this?

You can take inspiration from this thread and add a build-time step to generate an XML fragment of <ListItem> elements.

The second combobox can then show the states that belong to the country.

Note that there's no way to catch the event when a selected item is changed in a combobox. That's a well-known limitation of the MSI UI. You can try to achieve what you want with the workaround I call "twin-dialogs". See this thread for more information.