[wix-users] Adding Output of a Reference Project

[Bryan Dam]

Thanks for the reply Rob!  I meant to reply earlier with my eventual solution but was waiting on a second related piece.

What I didn't realize is that you could use the same variables in the Preprocessor variables.
Preprocessor variable: InstallFilesDir=..\MyReferencedProject\bin\$(Configuration)
HeadDirectory: Directory="$(ProjectDir)\..\MyReferencedProject\bin\$(Configuration)" PreprocessorVariable="var.InstallFilesDir"

Feels kinda hacky, needs to be done for each project, and would break if we rename the projects but it ... works.

The next problem was more pipeline automation related: I needed to code sign those projects before consuming them in the installer.  That was just a matter of building each project individually instead of the solution as a whole. Again, very project dependent but ... it works.

-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Mensching <rob at firegiant.com> 
Sent: Tuesday, June 8, 2021 12:18 PM
To: WiX Toolset Users Mailing List <wix-users at lists.wixtoolset.org>
Cc: Bryan Dam <bryand at recastsoftware.com>
Subject: RE: Adding Output of a Reference Project
Importance: Low

Not an answer: but project reference harvesting is way more complicated than it seems like it should be. At FireGiant we spent a lot of time working on advanced harvesting solution (https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.firegiant.com%2Fwix%2Fwep-documentation%2Fharvesting%2F&data=04%7C01%7Cbryand%40recastsoftware.com%7C3f0d905fdf114084166508d92a98f32c%7C9315bb44634846c6bd378880b87e774e%7C0%7C0%7C637587658683919686%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=FNvGvwx2u4RZjwAQKEsyIUk98Ggmmbb3%2Ft3%2BXxbRxMQ%3D&reserved=0). 

-----Original Message-----
From: wix-users <wix-users-bounces at lists.wixtoolset.org> On Behalf Of Bryan Dam via wix-users
Sent: Friday, May 28, 2021 1:01 PM
To: WiX Toolset Users Mailing List <wix-users at lists.wixtoolset.org>
Cc: Bryan Dam <bryand at recastsoftware.com>
Subject: [wix-users] Adding Output of a Reference Project

I have multiple EXEs that need to be installed as well as called via deferred custom action.  Their projects are in the same solution as the WiX project and each contain a whole long list of dependencies (NuGet packages).  What I'm having trouble doing is automatically capturing the output of the EXE projects.  I can manually build the EXEs and copy everything into an existing supporting file directory we harvest with HeatDirectory task.  That works but ideally I'd like to be able to build the whole solution in one go.

I've tried using project harvesting but while that grabs the actual EXEs themselves it doesn't grab their dependencies (a known issue).

So I'm trying to use HeatDirectory: Directory="$(ProjectDir)\..\MyReferencedProject\bin\$(Configuration)".  This works and generates the output file but the source all point to SourceDir as the root and the build complains that it can't find the files.  With the supporting files we use a pre-processor variable but in this case I want to refer directly to a relative path.

Is there a way to get the HeatDirectory task to generate relative paths to the source files?  Or maybe a better way to accomplish this whole thing (consume all the files in a referenced project's output folder)?

   Thanks,
      Bryan


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