Action state
We talked about the Level
attribute on Feature
elements and how it's used to enable or disable features. Behind the scenes, what you're doing is setting the action state of the feature. Action state is the thing that stores whether or not the end user has requested that the feature be installed. The same exists for components since we can enable and disable them too. It can have any of the following values:
Unknown: The state is not known, usually because costing has not taken place. No action will be taken on the component or feature.
Advertised: The feature will be installed as advertised, meaning install on demand. This doesn't exist for components.
Absent: The feature or component will not be installed.
Local: The feature or component will be installed to the local hard disk.
Source: The feature or component will be run from source, such as from a network share.
Action state is initially unknown until costing has taken place. Costing is the process of finding out how much...