WiX - Elevating (or reducing) privileges at install time

Question

I am working on a project that has been using 2 VD projects to distribute admin and user versions of installations, and now I need to switch to WiX. It was a bit painful experience with lack of documentation and all, but I managed to make something of it.

However, there is still one problem: I want to make only one .msi which will allow user to choose whether he wants to install as admin or as user. If he chose user, I don't want to ask him for elevation (as he doesn't need it), also if he chose admin, I don't want the installation to crash but to ask for privileges.

My current solution crashes in admin mode if I set InstallPrivileges to limited because the user doesn't have the permission to install, and it prompts for elevation in user mode if I set it to elevated.

My opinion is that there is no way to fix this because of compatibility with MSI, but perhaps there is some way to change privileges from elevated to limited in install time that I'm missing.

In conclusion, I want to know these things:

• Is it possible to change privileges at install time
• If there is no way to do so, what is the best workaround for this problem (exporting 2 .msi files or something)

Answer 1

One solution is to build two separate installers and then launch them via a custom WiX bootstrapper (aka Burn). The bootstrapper would be in charge of displaying the UI and launching the appropriate .msi.

Or you could separate the "admin" features into a separate .msi and then use a custom bootstrapper to install both .msis if the user selects an admin install.