WiX Installer: How to hide/remove the Welcome dialog in WixUI_InstallDir mode

Question

I am trying to remove the WelcomeDlg from the built-in WixUI_InstallDir dialog set.

For creating the setup executable and adding prerequisites, I used the bootstrap application where in I bundles the created msi. Now the issue is the bootstrap comes with its own Welcome dialog and the embedded msi also shows its own dialog box. In order to get rid of the msi welcome dialog, I have removed the Publish statemnts related to Welcome dlg from the custom WixUI_InstallDir.wxs. But I am not able to get hide the welcome dialog.

Is there any way to get rid of the msi welcome dialog?

Answer 1

Recently I also faced similar kind of situation where I need to exclude showing WelcomeDlg. Our idea was to create a custom license agreement dialog as the first dialog of the UI.

In order to achieve that behavior, following changes have been made.

• Created a new wxs dialog with id "AdvancedWelcomeEulaDlgEx" which shows the EULA, checkbox to accept and Next button.

• In this dialog's InstallUISequence, added the following line.

   <InstallUISequence> <Show Dialog="AdvancedWelcomeEulaDlgEx" Before="ProgressDlg">NOT Installed</Show> </InstallUISequence>

• Suppress the WelcomeDlg from showing. We used an approach like below in main UI fragment (Condition ensures that it won't show in normal case; In our case Installed and Patch case never happens as it is the way it handled)

   <InstallUISequence> <Show Dialog="WelcomeDlg" Before="AdvancedWelcomeEulaDlgEx" >Installed AND PATCH</Show> </InstallUISequence>

You can check out this link which explains a similar kind of approach.

Basically the idea is to suppress the Welcome dialog and use the next dialog or custom dialog as initial one. Also, the Publish events of Next and other dialog's events should be rewired accordingly.