Making a custom setup dialog using WiX 3.0

Recently I started diving into WiX (Windows Installer XML) as a toolset for a setup project I needed to create. And it didn't take much time to discover that WiX provides some nice out of the box dialogs without having to do much work.
That is, if you only need the basic configurations, such as a folder browse dialog and a license agreement.
However, my project required just that little extra dialog, to provide the location of a SQL database. Basically, what I needed was two textboxes, one to input the server name, and one to input the SQL instance name.

The bad news first: there is not much documentation available (I feel) on how to create some custom dialog stuff.
The good news: it doesn't take much work to do so :) here's how.

You may or may not know that WiX provides some basic layout schema's, from the WiXUI assembly. These are WixUI_Mondo, WixUI_FeatureTree, WixUI_InstallDir, and WixUI_Minimal. In my project, I used WixUI_InstallDir, just for the reason of the need to be able to select a folder to install to.<br /><br />

So what you need to do first is download the source code of WiX. It's an open source project located on SourceForge
Once that's done, locate the file WixUI_InstallDir.wxs in the source folder, add it to your own WiX setup project, and name it MyWixUI_InstallDir (basically, you can choose whatever name you want). Open the MyWixUI_InstallDir file in code window of Visual Studio.

Now, to get what I wanted, I simply added the following code between

<Publish Dialog="InstallDirDlg" Control="ChangeFolder" Event="SpawnDialog" Value="BrowseDlg" Order="2">1</Publish>

AND

<publish dialog="VerifyReadyDlg" control="Back" event="NewDialog" value="InstallDirDlg" order="1">NOT Installed</publish>

-----

<dialog id="iDTADlg" width="370" height="270" title="Localisation of the BizTalk Tracking database">
        <control id="Next" type="PushButton" x="236" y="243" width="56" height="17" default="yes" text="Next">
          <publish event="NewDialog" value="VerifyReadyDlg">1</publish>
        </control>
        <control id="Back" type="PushButton" x="180" y="243" width="56" height="17" text="Back">
          <publish event="NewDialog" value="iSQLDlg">1</publish>
        </control>
        <control id="Cancel" type="PushButton" x="304" y="243" width="56" height="17" cancel="yes" text="Cancel">
          <publish event="SpawnDialog" value="CancelDlg">1</publish>
        </control>

</dialog>

As you can see, I named this new dialog iDTADlg.
Now to force this dialog to be shown after you chose the install location, you need to find the Publish InstallDirDlg tags and replace the <control event="NewDialog">-line with this:

OK, so that's it for the dialog itself. Now, you normally have a file in your project called Product.wxs. If you want to make use of the WixUI features, you should already have something like this in your file: <uiref id="WixUI_InstallDir" />

Simply replace this with <uiref id="MyWixUI_InstallDir" /> and you're clear :)

Note: in my iDTADlg I stored some values in properties. These properties were also defined in the Product.wxs file:
<property id="WIXUI_DTAServer" value="DTAServer"></property>
<property id="WIXUI_DTAInstance" value="DTAInstance"></property>

So that's it.
So when I run the setup, I get this little basic dialog asking me for a SQL server and an instance:

Posted on Tuesday, December 9, 2008 10:02 AM | Back to top

Comments on this post: Making a custom setup dialog using WiX 3.0

# re: Making a custom setup dialog using WiX 3.0

How does this "custom dialog" work into the "Open Source" paradigm? Do/Should you include the changes you have made when shipping your "new" installer?

Left by Gerald on Jul 23, 2009 11:01 AM

The WiX platform as is is fully open source, but that does not have to mean that the packages you create with it need to be open source as well. Do you see the SQL Server installer being open source? They use WiX too

Left by Jan Schepens on Sep 30, 2009 9:09 AM

This was awesome, thank you. it helped me tremendously.

Just one thing I observed if I may. Your properties are called "WIXUI_DTAServer" & "WIXUI_DTAInstance" however in your Dialog you reference them as "DTAServer" & "DTAInstance" respectively.

That foxed me for a coupla minutes :)

Regards
@Jamiet

Left by Jamie Thomson on Feb 02, 2011 11:31 AM