WiX Bundle with dynamic MsiPackage names

Question

I'm converting our current monolithic installer to use a WiX 3.7 Bundle/chain. We have several components that are now building into their own separately-maintainable MSI installers. My next task is to add all of these to a bootloader/bootchainer, but I've hit a snag.

A requirement for our individual installers is that they contain the version in the filename (i.e. MyApplication-5.4.22.msi). I don't see a tool like Heat for collecting MSI packages together, and I don't see a way to add an MsiPackage element with a wildcard to account for varying package names.

As a last resort, I can wrap the bundler inside of another MSBuild script that will 'autocomplete' the filenames and pass the paths in as variables to the bundler. I'm hoping someone can recommend a solution that works directly in the wxs or wixproj setting.

Answer 1

If the msi files are built with WiX Setup projects, the WiX Bootstrapper project can reference them, thereby creating useful WiX variables that are defined as the paths to the msi files.

See my answer here, as well as the list of variables here.

If that's not the case then you can write some MSBuild targets that run before the Build target to figure out the actual file paths. If the available standard and community MSBuild tasks aren't sufficient, you can write your own tasks, either by creating an assembly or using inline code. (And, of course, there is always the Exec task to shell out to a command-line program like cmd.exe, after which you can parse its output to extract the msi paths.)