skizz.biz

I have been spiking migrating our project’s InstallShield scripts to Wix. There are several good reasons to do this, which I will get to in another post.

But when trying to decompile the InstallShield msi using Dark I get the following error:

dark.exe : error DARK0001 : Cannot set column 'KeyColumn' with value 0 because it is less than the minimum allowed value for this column, 1.

Exception Type: System.InvalidOperationException

Stack Trace:
   at Microsoft.Tools.WindowsInstallerXml.ColumnDefinition.ValidateValue(Object value)
   at Microsoft.Tools.WindowsInstallerXml.Unbinder.UnbindDatabase(String databaseFile, Database database, OutputType outputType, String exportBasePath)
   at Microsoft.Tools.WindowsInstallerXml.Unbinder.UnbindDatabase(String databaseFile, OutputType outputType, String exportBasePath)
   at Microsoft.Tools.WindowsInstallerXml.Unbinder.Unbind(String file, OutputType outputType, String exportBasePath)

It turns out that InstallShield doesn’t put the right values in the _Validation table (whatever that is). Some hints are in this bug. It is next to impossible to fix it from the InstallShield side, so I did it by fixing the Wix side.

Note: You need to check out the CVS version of Wix to build it - the source downloads from the website do not work. No documentation on this anywhere of course. Sigh.

When you have the code compiling, the hack is simple - modify the columnDefinition for KeyColumn in the file src/wix/Data/tables.xml to allow 0’s in that column. Note that this is a hack not a solution. This may cause other problems and probably the Wix guys will need to fix this for real, maybe by supplying a default value. But it did allow me to export the MSI successfully.

Patch against the latest cvs:

Index: src/wix/Data/tables.xml
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/wix/wix/src/wix/Data/tables.xml,v
retrieving revision 1.49
diff -u -r1.49 tables.xml
--- src/wix/Data/tables.xml	21 Sep 2007 07:58:40 -0000	1.49
+++ src/wix/Data/tables.xml	21 Nov 2007 14:32:05 -0000
@@ -1482,7 +1482,7 @@
         <columnDefinition name="KeyTable" type="string" length="255" nullable="yes"
                 category="identifier" description="For foreign key, Name of table to which data must link"/>
         <columnDefinition name="KeyColumn" type="number" length="2" nullable="yes"
-                minValue="1" maxValue="32" description="Column to which foreign key connects"/>
+                minValue="0" maxValue="32" description="Column to which foreign key connects"/>
         <columnDefinition name="Category" type="string" length="32" nullable="yes"
                 set="Text;Formatted;Template;Condition;Guid;Path;Version;Language;Identifier;Binary;UpperCase;LowerCase;Filename;Paths;AnyPath;WildCardFilename;RegPath;KeyFormatted;CustomSource;Property;Cabinet;Shortcut;URL" description="String category"/>
         <columnDefinition name="Set" type="string" length="255" nullable="yes"

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 1:07 am and is filed under development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.