WiX 3.6: A Developer's Guide to Windows Installer XML

The ComponentGroup element

The ComponentGroup element is used to group Component elements, which is helpful as it offers a way to reference all of your components with a single element. For example, when adding components to Feature (which you must always do), you could use ComponentRef elements directly. This is the technique we used in the previous chapter:

<Feature Id="ProductFeature"
         Title="Main Product"
         Level="1">
  <ComponentRef Id="CMP_MyProgramEXE" />
  <ComponentRef Id="CMP_AnotherFileDLL" />
</Feature>

However, by creating ComponentGroup, you can reference multiple components with a single ComponentGroupRef element. This is shown in the following snippet:

<Feature Id="ProductFeature"
         Title="Main Product"
         Level="1">
 <ComponentGroupRef Id="MyComponentGroup" ...