Intended solution for harvesting two projects with shared files

[Toby222]

I'm trying to create a setup where one of the features requires two projects (a backend executable and a database migration tool)
The two projects share a bunch of libraries, so if I try to harvest both of their output folders into the same install folder, I logically get WIX0091 errors for duplicate files. Is there any way to deduplicate files like this?
Or what would be the simplest way to achieve this without having to resort to manually specifying the library files?

[nirbar]

If you're absolutely sure that both projects use the same set of library versions, then you can build both into the same output folder and harvest them once
If they might be using different versions of the libraries then you better install them into different folders

[Toby222]

The libraries are our own first party projects, so yea they're using the same, but building into the same folder seems counter-intuitive as well

[nirbar]

If you're deploying to the same folder, why is building to the same folder counterintuitive?

Another way would be harvesting a parent folder of the two build folders with a xslt to merge both folders into a single install folder

[Toby222]

Counterintuitive since I've only ever seen projects output to their own directory, and it feels like stuff like the detection if a project is up-to-date would break if I had two projects build in one folder

Plus I've got another project that actually gets installed to several other Features ^^;
(That one I'm hoping I can replace with a custom action or something in the future, something to properly set the App.config values after install)

[robmen]

At FireGiant, we call these "diamond dependencies", and our Advanced Harvesting, which is part of the "HeatWave Build Tools" supports them. Today, you get those tools as part of FireGiant support contract.

[Toby222]

From what that post says, I'm not sure it'd solve the issue of duplicate files?
My problem is harvesting (or installing) two projects with overlapping dependencies into one folder without unnecessarily duplicating the libraries.
Either way I take it this isn't possible with just the open source wix tooling

[robmen]

The documentation for Advanced Harvesting doesn't explicitly call or the handling of diamonds, it probably should.

No, it is not part of the Open Source project. It's one of the features we offer from FireGiant. Is that an issue?

[Toby222]

Absolutely not in a position to get enterprise tools for this :^)
I'll figure something out, thanks anyway

[chrpai]

In a wix v4/5 world you could simply publish the two apps to two different directories and then use Files to dynamically harvest them. They will author duplicate components (but different directories) and while this will take up more space on the target machine it won't make the MSI any bigger due to smart cabbing.

I went deep down this road once upon a time and decided to pass on harvesting. Free consultations are available to discuss how I'd handle it if you'd like.

[Toby222]

That's exactly the solution I wanted to avoid :p