Making Progress Bars behave nicely

After my previous blog entry about installation pet-peeves, including how writing progress bar code is hard, I figured I would try to help a bit by providing a simple sample for MSI authors. At the same time, a question related to progress bars appears on the newsgroups. Coincidence?

If any of you have some stylesheet stuff I can add to make posting/reading code snippets on a blog less painful for both you and me, please send it in.

The usage in a Custom Action is pretty simple: you parse CustomActionData if you are running deferred and determine how many things you have to do. Then call setupProgress("MyCA","Transmorgifying files",10); if there are 10 things to do. When performing each of the 10 things, shoot off a call to tickProgress("this filename"); and the bar should behave nicely. It's pretty easy to convert to the Custom Action language of your choice. Most of the information needed to create this sample is in the Session.Message() documentation.

var msiMessageTypeProgress = 0x0A000000;
var msiMessageTypeActionStart = 0x08000000;
var msiMessageTypeActionData = 0x09000000;

function setupProgress(ActionName, ActionDescription, numTicksExpected)
{
//set the UI Status ACTIONSTART
var statusRecordObj = Installer.CreateRecord(3);
statusRecordObj.StringData(1) = ActionName;
statusRecordObj.StringData(2) = ActionDescription;
//below line defines a template for display on each message tick
statusRecordObj.StringData(3) = "[1]";
Session.Message(msiMessageTypeActionStart, statusRecordObj);

//resets the progress bar.
var progressRecordObj = Installer.CreateRecord(4);
progressRecordObj.IntegerData(1) = 0; //0 = reset bar
progressRecordObj.IntegerData(2) = numTicksExpected+1;
progressRecordObj.IntegerData(3) = 0; //0 = left-to-right, 1= R-to-L
progressRecordObj.IntegerData(4) = 0; //0 = calc time remaining
Session.Message(msiMessageTypeProgress, progressRecordObj);

//tell the progress bar to increment for each ActionData message
progressRecordObj.IntegerData(1) = 1; //Action Info
progressRecordObj.IntegerData(2) = 1; //numTicks each ActionData
progressRecordObj.IntegerData(3) = 1; //increment bar for each ActionData
Session.Message(msiMessageTypeProgress, progressRecordObj);
}

function tickProgress(message)
{
//The ActionData record follows the template defined in the msiMessageTypeActionStart
//item #3. Refer to the MSI documentation related to templates. If you add more fields
//to the template, make sure to add the additional fields here as well.
var progressObject = Installer.CreateRecord(1);
progressObject.StringData(1) = message;
Session.Message(msiMessageTypeActionData, progressObject);
}