Copy multiple files using wildcards / recursively using Wix

Question

I am a complete noob on Wix (and installers in general), so please forgive me.

My goal is to be able to navigate the directory, search for all, say, * .exe files, and copy them to a predefined destination folder. The thing is, I don’t know what kind of files and their names are, so I can’t print them one by one in a wxs file ... therefore, wildcards.

Now I got something like this:

... <Directory Id='TARGETDIR' Name='SourceDir'> <Directory Id='ProgramFilesFolder' Name='PFiles'> <Directory Id='MyDir' Name='TestProj'> <Component Id='MyComponent' Guid='PUT_GUID_HERE'> <CopyFile Id="CopyFiles" DestinationProperty="DESTDIR" SourceName="*.exe" SourceProperty="SRCDIR" /> </Component> </Directory> </Directory> </Directory> ... 

Well, that's fine if I only read from SRCDIR, but what if there are subfolders? How can I search for files with a specific extension? Or is there another way to do this ...?

Same thing with deleting the same files after installation ...

Thanks for any help you can give!

Answer 1

The way to do this is with the John Robbin Paraffin command-line tool. It starts automatically through the directories you select and creates a WiX fragment that references these files. Paraffin is great for this, as it supports adding new files later without creating new GUIDs for old files, i.e. Supports a developing project.

Like everything on WiX, it's quite active, so I read his blog post.