[wix-users] Instantiate a Set of Related Standard Elements Multiple Times

[Edwin Castro]

I'm considering writing a custom compiler (?) extension that would provide
a custom element that represents a small set of related custom actions. The
purpose of the custom element and extension is to make it easy to author /
use this set of related custom actions. As a result, ideally, I'd just like
to produce the same output that parsing the standard elements would produce
without needing to generate that output myself.

Conceptually, I'd like to write something like

<ext:MyCustomElement Id="..." Attrib1="..." Attrib2="..." ... />

and have it "expand" to the equivalent of

<CustomAction Id="..." ... />
<CustomAction Id="..." ... />
<CustomAction Id="..." ... />
<!-- etc -->

The custom actions are related and must be instantiated as a group once per
instance of the custom element because they need to be scheduled at
different locations in InstallExecuteSequence. In other words, I don't
think I can use table-driven custom actions because I can't process these
bits at the same logical place in the InstallExecuteSequence.

It is analogous to scheduling a bunch of WixSilentExec custom actions with
their associated properties and custom action data. Each instance produces
a number of standard elements that go together but cannot be aggregated
into a table to be processed at one time.

Currently I'm thinking of using a wxi, <?define?>, and <?include?> but
that's less than ideal. An extension seems like more work but could
potentially result is something that is much easier to use and less error
prone. I'm just not very familiar with what wixobj output various standard
elements need to produce so I am hoping there's a way that I could parse my
element and generate some temporary objects (or something similar) that can
produce the correct output for me.

For example, ParseSetPropertyElement and ParseCustomActionElement are
private and consume an XmlElement. What I'd like to do is get the
equivalent of the functionality of ParseSetPropertyElement and
ParseCustomActionElement (the wixobj output they produce) by instantiating
those elements at compile-time. Hmm... not sure I'm describing what I'd
like to do well enough. I suppose what I was hoping for was something very
similar to <macrodef> in ant. I understand that <macrodef> doesn't exist in
WiX today but I was hoping I could emulate it in C# in an extension.

--
Edwin G. Castro