Integrating Help2 files into VS 2005 - part 2

The other workaround I hinted in the previous post involves a bit of manual labor the first time (or if you ask nicely, I might just provide the needed parts), if used more than once it is IMO less painful than the ORCA route.

This solution takes advantage of <CustomTable> feature of WiX. By "reverse engineering" the needed table schemas out of the relevant merge module MSHelp2_RegTables__RTL_---_---.msm we can author these tables as <CustomTable>:s and then just add <Row>:s as appropriate.

Next time just edit the row data and you're set.

For brevity, I just post one table here, but the rest can be made available upon request.

The tables I've used are HelpFile, HelpFileToNamespace, HelpNamespace and HelpPlugin.

      <CustomTable Id="HelpFileToNamespace">
        <!-- HelpFileToNamespace table definition -->
        <Column 
          Type="string" 
          PrimaryKey="yes" 
          Id="HelpFile_" 
          Nullable="no" 
          KeyTable="HelpFile" 
          KeyColumn="1" 
          Category="Identifier" 
          Description="Foreign key into HelpFile table (required)." />
        <Column 
          Type="string" 
          Width="72"
          PrimaryKey="yes" 
          Id="HelpNamespace_" 
          Nullable="no" 
          KeyTable="HelpNamespace" 
          KeyColumn="1" 
          Category="Identifier" 
          Description="Foreign key into HelpNamespace table (required)."/>

        <!-- data -->
        <Row>
          <Data Column="HelpFile_">YourHelpFileKey</Data>
          <Data Column="HelpNamespace_">YourHelpNamespaceKey</Data>
        </Row>
      </CustomTable>