wix - Copy an entire directory and all of its cont

Question

My wix installer needs the contents of a directory to be copied to a destination folder. I understand that the Directory element has a FileSource attrib. I tried something like this:

<DirectoryRef Id="DIRECTORY" FileSource="{var.Dir}">
  <Component Id="Dir" Guid="*" >
    <CreateFolder/>
  </Component>
</DirectoryRef>

This is not picking up the files or sub-directories from the preprocessor variable.

Are there any alternate ways to achieve this?

Answer 1

No, not unless you use a custom action. WiX likes for every file to be tracked individually. You can use heat to generate the directory listing for you.

Answer 2

Use heat.exe or HeatTask in MSBuild. That's the only way to do things today.