Find and Replace

[computerquip-work]

Feature requests

• Describe the scenario and benefits that the feature supports.

InstallShield and AdvancedInstaller both provide "extensions" that allow one to generically search for a string such as $REPLACEME and replace with a value given by the user at install time. WiX is capable of such but it's mighty inconvenient in its current form and requires a bit of research and work. There are already attempts at doing this as well but they're a bit outdated and unmaintained at this point.

• Describe how you're accomplishing the feature today (if possible).

So far, I've been lucky in that I can change most of my configuration formats to fit the needs of WiX. I find this to be quite backwards. I recently didn't have such luck and it became a real problem since WiX doesn't understand the configuration file format and there is no real convenient way of accomplishing the task. It turned into custom data to a custom action that invoked PowerShell initially which was pretty awful and I'm not sure if it actually worked how I intended.

• Describe what you'd like the new feature to do.

At install time, I'd like the user to be able to provide values that the installer can use to generate an initial configuration file. There's a few ways to go to accomplish that.

• A regular expression search and replace in the style of sed
• A templating engine in the style of jinja or similar
• Something real simple similar to envsubst on Linux.

[chrpai]

Have you checked out https://github.com/dblock/msiext ?

[barnson]

Already supported: https://wixtoolset.org/docs/schema/util/formatfile/

[computerquip-work]

I had no idea this existed, thanks.