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I've been looking at various different ways of making an installer (see How to create a robust, minimal installer for Windows? for details), and I've run into the same thing in a couple of them (WiX and the visual studio installer creator); there doesn't seem to be a way to say "When you build the installer, include every file matching c:\somefolder\*.xml".

I can go and select *.xml and add all the files that match to the project at once, but then if I add another .xml file to my program later, I'd need to go and add that to the installer myself.

Is this a core limitation of windows installer, that I can't just tell it "sort all the XML files in this folder out and don't bother me about them"?

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Colen
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2 Answers2

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WiX toolset contains an utility called Heat. It can generate the WiX authoring for you based on your needs. The output can be further transformed by XSL templates (-t switch).

Hope this helps.

Yan Sklyarenko
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InstallShield also has this ( see Dynamic File Linking ) but honestly I don't like this pattern in general. It's non-deterministic in nature. I speak from 14 years of experience when I say that if a file is added or removed from my application I want to explicitly add it or remove it from my applications installer. Any magic to automate this has always bitten me in that it takes what should have been a build time error and turns it into a run time error.

My best practice is to write some automation that compares what was available to be consume against what was consumed by the installer. The two lists must match 100% or otherwise fail the build. When the build fails you must choose to either add the file to the installer or cease to archive the file to the directory. With the right tooling, it's trivial to add a file to the installer and the result is 100% accuracy of developer intent being applied to the installer.

Christopher Painter
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