Setting conditions on Components in Wix

Question

In my Wix, I have lots of files included in this way:

<Component Id="mycomponent" Guid="*" Feature="Core" >
  <Condition>$(var.Include) = 1</Condition>
  <File Id="mycomponent.file" KeyPath="yes" 
        Source="$(var.BinDir)\mycomponent.file" />
</Component>

So I can pass in a different value of var.Include to generate packages for different environment.

While the resulting packages do seem to work, however I noticed the size of the packages are always quite big even when I set it to not include these components. It looks as if WiX is always including all components in building the msi, and only chose to not install these components when the package was build with var.Include = 0...

Is this a normal behavior?

Answer 1

You can confirm by opening your MSI output file using some File compressing/uncompressing software such as 7zip and open the package.cab file inside the opened MSI file. and check whether your files with the id like "mycomponent" is present there or not.

I hope it is expected since it is dependent on the variable and that can be something which even can be set from install command call as install property.

UPDATE: You can amend the WIX like below by using Preprocessor statements, so it can exclude these optional component from the resulting msi

    <?if $(env.MySku) = Enterprise ?>
       <Component Id="mycomponent" Guid="*" Feature="Core">
          <Condition>$(var.Include) = 1</Condition>
          <File Id="mycomponent.file" KeyPath="yes" Source="$(var.BinDir)\mycomponent.file" />      
       </Component>
    <?endif ?>