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We are using the WIX Toolset among other things to automate a long installation process. A big part of this is installing lots of prerequisites that change based on what version of the product the customer wants to install.

e.g. there is a filter pack (.msi file) involved in the installation that only needs to be installed with a certain type of the product, so it is impossible to simple chain it into a bundle because we cannot know in advance which version the customer chooses.

Is there any way to solve this problem without having to create 4 different installers or installing all prerequisites regardless of version?

Thanks in advance.

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The easiest and most maintainable (imo) method for implementing this is to use a burn bootstrapper and have a separate msi install for each version of the product the user could install.

The burn boostrapper would also contain all the prerequisite packages needed but only install the ones required by the specific version the user chooses to install.

You say you can't include the filter pack in the chain because you don't know until runtime whether or not the customer wants it but that's the whole point of the bootstrapper. Your bootstrapper should gather the information at runtime and set variables accordingly. Using the InstallCondition on the MsiPackage element you can determine whether or not you need to install the msi or not.

The bootstrapper process is to run Detect, do the UI, Plan, Execute. During Plan you will figure out which packages will be run and installed during the installation. The bootstrapper application has the authority to set any package to install or uninstall, overriding whatever the engine decides to do.

You could also include all the msi version stuff in one MSI and control it via feature groups which would allow you to use one MSI fo all the versions of your product but this can get bloated and complicated with multiple 'duplicated' components from different versions of your product so I think this would become a maintainability hell later on.

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You can add a custom dialog which has checkboxes where the user can choose what to install.

These checkboxes set a variable to 0 or 1. You can use these variables in the installcondition.

I believe you can even conditionally show checkboxes(say 2 off the 5 are already installed, you would not want to give the user the option to install the already installed 2)

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