How do I create an empty custom table in Wix?

Question

How do I get Wix to include a CustomTable with no rows in the final MSI? If I simply define the table like this

<CustomTable Id="MyTable">
  <Column Id="Id" Type="string" Category="Identifier" PrimaryKey="yes"/>
  <Column Id="Root" Type="string"/>
  <Column Id="Key" Type="string"/>
  <Column Id="Name" Type="string"/>
</CustomTable>

Wix omits it from the final output.

My DTF CustomAction is expecting it to be there, so that it can add rows to it during execution.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Thanks to a comment in this blog post (which, by the way, has a very useful example of a DTF Custom Action) I found the Wix EnsureTable element, which makes sure a table appears in the output, even if it is empty.

So to make my example work, I need to do this:

<CustomTable Id="MyTable">
  <Column Id="Id" Type="string" Category="Identifier" PrimaryKey="yes"/>
  <Column Id="Root" Type="string"/>
  <Column Id="Key" Type="string"/>
  <Column Id="Name" Type="string"/>
</CustomTable>

<EnsureTable Id="MyTable"/>