Included with the WiX toolset is a tool called Tallow. This tool is meant for the purpose of walking a directory tree to produce valid Fragments containing Directories, Components and Files. Unfortunately though, when using the tool you don't get a "Guid" attribute on each "Component" element as seen in the below example:
C:\wix>tallow -d ./doc -nologo
<Wix xmlns="
http://schemas.microsoft.com/wix/2003/01/wi">
<Fragment>
<DirectoryRef Id="TARGETDIR">
<Directory Id="directory0" Name="doc">
<Component Id="component0" DiskId="1">
<File Id="file0" Name="vssver2.scc" src="C:\wix\doc\vssver2.scc" />
<File Id="file1" Name="WiX.chm" src="C:\wix\doc\WiX.chm" />
<File Id="file2" Name="wix.xsd" src="C:\wix\doc\wix.xsd" />
<File Id="file3" Name="wixloc.xsd" src="C:\wix\doc\wixloc.xsd" />
</Component>
</Directory>
</DirectoryRef>
</Fragment>
</Wix>
This in turn causes a problem on eventual uninstallation of the generated MSI - as there are no component Guid's, Windows Installer doesn't know which files to remove!
Enter Stefan Zschocke's "Mallow" tool available from
http://www.infozoom.de/download/Mallow.zip. This tool overcomes the limitations of Tallow - and also adds
synchronisation functionality - the tool can be run with an existing .wxs file as input, any extra files will be added and existing component Guid's will be preserved.
C:\wix>mallow -d ./doc
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="IBM437"?>
<Wix xmlns="
http://schemas.microsoft.com/wix/2003/01/wi">
<!--Mallow protocol 10/12/2005 18:48:45
Added Component Id=component0 Path=
-->
<Fragment>
<DirectoryRef Id="TARGETDIR">
<Component Id="component0" Guid="ec4d2b48-28f5-4c3d-bf02-ebc1d490177f" DiskId="1">
<File Id="file0" Name="vssver2.scc" src="C:\wix\doc\vssver2.scc" />
<File Id="file1" Name="WiX.chm" src="C:\wix\doc\WiX.chm" />
<File Id="file2" Name="wix.xsd" src="C:\wix\doc\wix.xsd" />
<File Id="file3" Name="wixloc.xsd" src="C:\wix\doc\wixloc.xsd" />
</Component>
</DirectoryRef>
</Fragment>
</Wix>
Actually,
Rob Mensching has updated SourceForge to say that this functionality has now been added to Tallow, see
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1120401&group_id=105970&atid=642717 - and as Rob mentions in his blog post, they are gearing up to
push another release to SourceForge imminently including MSI 4.0 support.