how to create a wix bootstrapper application that runs self extracting exe as an exepackage

Question

I have 2 installation packages that are prerequisites for our application. Both of these are downloaded from the vendor as self extracting executables containing the actual setup.exe and hundreds of files and folders required for the installation. When I run the sfx exe using an exepackage in the bootstrapper application it will run the extraction portion then kick off the installation setup.exe and then close the extraction exe while the installation is still going. This causes the next exepackage to try to run prematurely and ends up with a messy install.

Is there a way to work around this using wix? I have tried using a standard setup that runs a custom action to extract the files and setup.exe then run the installation exe then wait until the installation exe is terminated before moving on to the second package but the installation setup.exe gets stuck and does not continue until initiating wix installer's msiexec is terminated.

I am suprised not to see this issue brought up in stackoverflow so I am hoping that I am overthinking it and there is a simple way to do this. Thanks in advance.

Dosia

Answer 1

If anyone is interested, I extracted everything for SFX that I need. Then I created my own SFX from the extracted files using WinRAR. WinRAR SFX options give me the ability to keep the SFX process running until the rest of the installation portion is finished. This keeps the bootstrap application simple.

Dosia

Sounds slightly similar to a question I just answered here. Perhaps worth a skim. Do you run this in silent mode? What setups are these - what products? Are they legacy installers? (non-MSI). Sounds like you used to use WiX? – Poona