[wix-devs] WIXBUG3704 - Allow access to persisted variables from related bundles

[Hoover, Jacob]

Unrecognized types?  The engine only supports a fixed set of types. Extensions can’t define additional variable types.

“Much easier” is an opinion.

If we really want to go the string route, why not use a JSON object in the registry?  We could then define it’s type and value, still live as a string, and have a well defined structure to validate against.

From: Ron Martin <cpuwzd at comcast.net>
Sent: Tuesday, May 4, 2021 11:51 AM
To: Hoover, Jacob <Jacob.Hoover at greenheck.com>; wix-devs <wix-devs at lists.wixtoolset.org>
Subject: Re: [wix-devs] WIXBUG3704 - Allow access to persisted variables from related bundles


Some of the things I thought about before making my suggestion:

If all of the strings we store in the registry (in this context) are differentiated by their first character,
many new types can be added later if necessary. A single switch statement can be used to separate the type. Unrecognized types can be passed through extensions.

The registry was not designed for flexibility or extensibility. Binary data can be organized for
straight-forward decoding, just as string data, but for debugging purposes, it is much easier
to decode strings than raw binary representation of multiple data structures.

Registry strings should not be used to store binary data in its raw form because there is a
potential for truncation when a null character is encountered. Registry strings are constrained
to UTF-16 with no encoding prefix.

Ron
On 5/4/2021 11:27 AM, Hoover, Jacob wrote:
easier to handle.

From: wix-devs <wix-devs-bounces at lists.wixtoolset.org><mailto:wix-devs-bounces at lists.wixtoolset.org> On Behalf Of Ron Martin via wix-devs
Sent: Friday, April 30, 2021 2:49 PM
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Cc: Ron Martin <cpuwzd at comcast.net><mailto:cpuwzd at comcast.net>
Subject: Re: [wix-devs] WIXBUG3704 - Allow access to persisted variables from related bundles
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