Display installation summary in exit dialog in Wix installer

Question

There is a requirement that I am working on to display installation summary information at the end of successful installation on exit dialog. The information contains the features selected for installation and other user inputs during user interface, hence we need to generate the summary information dynamically using custom action.

One of the approach that I could think of is to customize the exit dialog and use control of type "ScrollableText" which is similar to license agreement control. The challenge here is to generate the summary information dynamically. Should we generate the summary information in RTF format?

Is there any other approach to display installation summary? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Rationale : I am a little bit skeptical of the value of this since you can inspect the system using the MSI API to determine what is installed at any time? You must have a concrete use-case where this summary display makes sense. Is it asked for by your customers?

RTF : If you really need it, I would do a low-ball approach of using simple ASCII text to show in the ScrollableText control. The control should be able to display regular text just fine. 7-BIT RTF should be able to show any ASCII, and also complex characters via escape sequences. I have never tried.

HTML : Alternatively I suppose you could write to a HTML file "somewhere" and then run a shell open command on it to open it in the default browser at the conclusion of the setup (click event for OK button)? This allows you to preserve the information after dismissing the dialog? Is that desirable? It also allows a "less insane" format than RTF (if you pardon the language). RTF really is nuts. It has to be said. The designers must have been on drugs... :-).