[wix-devs] Burn Variable breaking changes

[Rob Mensching]

> I think we went with literal in v3 because of the backwards compatibility of getting the unescaped value when a BA called GetVariableString. I think the convenience of "literal" is worth it, I just thought I would mention that we technically could do without it.

That history sounds right. You're closer to the code so I trust your judgement call on "literal" vs. doing nothing (except maybe adding a method to make it easier to escape strings).


-----Original Message-----
From: wix-devs <wix-devs-bounces at lists.wixtoolset.org> On Behalf Of Sean Hall via wix-devs
Sent: Friday, July 17, 2020 10:02 PM
To: WiX Toolset Developer Mailing List <wix-devs at lists.wixtoolset.org>
Cc: Sean Hall <r.sean.hall at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [wix-devs] Burn Variable breaking changes

>  SetVariableString(string value, bool formatted);

That seems reasonable.

>  that doesn't change the underlying type (assuming that's a thing)

I don't want that to be a thing. We're designing this where the string is declared to be literal or formatted when you're setting the variable. We theoretically could have done it differently where you somehow prevented the recursion when using the variable but we didn't go that way.

I've been thinking about this literal concept. Everything that you can do with literals, you can also do with just escaping the string. I think we went with literal in v3 because of the backwards compatibility of getting the unescaped value when a BA called GetVariableString. I think the convenience of "literal" is worth it, I just thought I would mention that we technically could do without it.