“Hide” Features Based on ALLUSERS / MSIINSTALLPERUSER

Question

I have an installer that I\'m converting from being an admin-only installation into a Single Package Authoring installer capable of being installed for the current user or for a

Answer 1

Per-User Setups: I won't lie to you, I actively avoid this sort of setup. I find MSI's per-user installation constructs "not ideal". It relates to poor serviceability (upgrades, patching, etc...) and a number of other details. Some details mid-page here.

Some links for others who read this answer (I think you have read these):

• Nice summary page on single package authoring from Advanced Installer
• Single Package Authoring
• Installation context
• MSIINSTALLPERUSER

Feature Conditions: With that said you can use feature conditions to unselect features based on whether a certain condition is true or false. You can even set the Level of a feature to 0 which will hide it from the GUI entirely during installation. You could try this. Please also read the linked answer below (bolded). It contains a better explanation of feature conditions.

I don't have time to test this, but here is a WiX mock-up that you can try:

 

     
       ALLUSERS=2 OR MSIINSTALLPERUSER=1
    

These answers might help you get an overview of this:

• How to set the level of feature based on condition in wix? (please do read this one).

• InstallShield conditional feature installation

• Failing condition wix

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Hide Feature Testing: I will add a little snippet you can use to verify the operation of the feature hiding. It forces the condition in question to be true by setting it to 1 - as opposed to using a "real condition" that can be false unexpectedly.

   1

This should hide the SupportingFiles feature from view in the setup GUI, and it should also not install it. Please let me know if you see a different behavior.

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Custom Actions: To interactively hide a feature based on changes done in the GUI, you can try to use custom actions to control the feature levels.

• Unselected Feature Being Installed

I am not sure this will work. I will test when I get the chance. Just adding that link for now.

UPDATE: I am unable to investigate this right now. I want to alert you to the possibility of adding temporary rows to the database during installation. Perhaps this is the way to go to hide the feature "interactively". I just don't know since I have never tried. Here is the first link I found on temporary records. And towards the bottom here are links. No guarantees.

Other than that I suppose you could use an external GUI launcher. I might comment on this later. I recently wrote about this issue (external GUI).

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Some Further Links For Reference:

• How to set the level of feature based on condition in wix?
• Unselected Feature Being Installed
• WiX Checkbox property only working if default value given