Wix Heat include files from a folder that are listed in another xml or txt and exclude the rest

Question

I would like to harvest a directory using Heat which contains a lot of files and not all of them should go into installation. However, i have a list of files that should be included in another XML in this format:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<FileSystemList>
   <File Path="\some_folder\some.file" />
   ...
</FileSystemList>

It could just as well be a simple text file with one file per line.

I already have a XSL transform which i can specify a file to exclude but it's not really appropriate if you have hundreds of files. I know almost nothing about XSL (been using samples i could find) so i would appreciate a help to somehow include this xml/txt file into the XSL which heat will use and exclude the files in the list.

Answer 1

Heat doesn't support that. Instead, use your build engine (e.g., MSBuild) to create a staging area that contains only the files you want to harvest.