[wix-users] Validation for Controls in Dialogs

[Edwin Castro]

Reminder that UI in MSI is implemented by the Windows Installer engine
itself and is data driven by a description of the UI elements in tables in
the MSI. All actions to be taken that are not standard actions must be
implemented via custom actions. This is the architecture of the Windows
Installer engine.

I'd guess the difficulty in implementing reusable custom actions that could
be contributed back to WiX is that you'd have to tell those custom actions
which properties to validate and how they are to be validated. I suspect
once you make those bits parameters, the custom action really doesn't do
much on its own other than getting properties and setting properties. In
the end it is probably not worth the effort.

If you wrap your MSI in a burn bundle, then you could implement your own
bootstrapper application providing whatever UI you want implemented in
whatever UI framework you want and that framework could provide lots of
validation goodies for you.

--
Edwin G. Castro



On Wed, May 16, 2018 at 8:55 AM, Ven H <venh.123 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Oh..Ok. It is a little disappointing. But, thank you very much for your
> detailed response. Really appreciate your support and patience.
>
> Regards,
> Venkatesh
>
> On Wed, May 16, 2018 at 8:23 PM, Edwin Castro <egcastr at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I don't write UIs for MSI so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I
>> believe you must implement validation as custom actions. As such, they can
>> only be triggered on page transition so the user must try to continue to
>> the next page before you can perform the validation.
>>
>> You might be able to transition automatically back to the previous page
>> if the validation failed. I vaguely remember a UI I reviewed once doing
>> that but that was more than a decade ago. I am most likely misremembering
>> the details.
>>
>> --
>> Edwin G. Castro
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, May 16, 2018, 04:46 Ven H via wix-users <
>> wix-users at lists.wixtoolset.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Can anyone please advise how to do validations on controls like Edit,
>>> ComboBox, RadioButtonGroup and so on? Is checking for the property value
>>> the only way?
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Venkatesh
>>>
>>> On Wed, May 9, 2018 at 6:33 PM, Ven H <venh.123 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> > Is it possible to validate the controls in Dialogs? Say for example, I
>>> > have a textbox which must have a value and also I should be able to
>>> > indicate that it is a required field using something like asterisk
>>> > (somewhat like asp.net). Is it possible? If so, can we have
>>> validation on
>>> > Combo boxes, checkboxes etc also? What all types of validations are
>>> > available (like Required, Regular Expresion, Numeric, Custom etc)?
>>> Please
>>> > advise.
>>> >
>>>
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>>
>