[wix-users] How to show the result of a CA on a dialog?

[Peter Schraffl]

Hi all,

our installer requires some features (basically IIS features) to be installed and fails if those are not installed on the system. In such cases the FatalError dialog is shown which does not provide any useful information about the root cause of the issue.
That’s why we have implemented a C# custom action which does some checks. If the checks fail, a message box with a dynamically generated text is shown via the session.Message(…) function before the CA returns an error result.
This is working fine so far.

Anyways we would prefer to show the message on the FatalError dialog (or less preferred on its own dialog). Mostly because the generated message might be pretty long and the length of the text shown in the message box is limited, causing the message to be cut off.

So the general question is: how can the (dynamically generated) value of a property (the “result” of a C# custom action) be shown on a dialog? Preferably on the FatalError dialog.

Any hints would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance and a happy new year.

Kind regards
Schraffl Peter