Virtualization

You don't need to go as far as making seperate sequences to do this. What I would do is make one sequence that has all the basics to launch and run the app then for each unique environment I would make a copy of the shortcut but add a pre-launch script that would either edit the INI file in the sequence or copy a INI file into the sequence. The key thing to note here is to make sure the script runs inside the virtual environment. With Softgrid scripts you can choose to run them inside or outside the virtual environment plus there are a bunch on timing flags.

For example the EVENT and TIMING attributes should be set to LAUNCH and PRE. This would mean that the script is run at launch and before the application is run. The PROTECT attribute when set to TRUE ensures that the script will be run in the virtual environment. You can also use the SUCCESSRESULT attribute to ensure that your application only launches if the script executes successfully. Below is a quick example of what you might use.


<SCRIPT EVENT="LAUNCH" TIMING="PRE" WAIT="TRUE" PROTECT="TRUE" SUCCESSRESULT="1">
<HREF>C:\WINDOWS\system32\xcopy.exe \\SERVER\APPSHARE\MY.INI Q:\MYAPP\</HREF>
</SCRIPT>


For more information on the OSD specification check out this real cool interactive web page of the OSD.

http://www.tmurgent.com/OSD_Illustrated.aspx

1) I am not sure exactly what you are getting at. Do you need to customize these things when packaging or at deployment time?

2) Softgrid isn't an installer so there isn't an equivalent to public properties that I can think of. You can use scripts to customize the virtual environment at run time but again I am not entirely sure what you are looking to achieve.

Hi KKaminsk,

I can capture the INI entries during sequencing, however if we take a simple scenario where INI file stores a Server name for connectivity and the server name changes for different locations.

Then would it mean that for different configurations I will have to create different packages with appropriate settings of INI file?

In the days of MSI packaging I would have replaced the value INI file with a public property whos value can be changed duriong deployment time.

Cheers,
V

Thanks.

Does this means that I will have different OSd files for multiple environments? I am assuming that shortcuts are directly related to OSD files?

While we are on this topic, I also want to undrestand if I can use VBscript / WMI within OSD scripts?

Cheers,
V

Yes, you would have an OSD for every environment unless you built a script with UI that allowed the user to choose which environment they want to launch. As for the VBScript question you can just call the VBS as a pre-launch script. It should be able to talk to WMI without issue.

Thanks.
I have one more question -

Is there a way I can generate a report of the sequence monitor process. Which can show me what files / registry sequencer has captured ?

Many Thanks.

Cheers,
V

If you are looking for what Wise does during the capture process then no it does not. It does display the results of the capture in the Virtual File System and the Virtual Registry but there is no CSV file that will describe the contents of the Sequence. The SPRJ and OSD files are XML complaint so they contain some information about the Sequence but it probably does not have the detail that you are looking for.

Thanks mate. I could find that the sequencer reads the .SFT and the .SPRJ to display the report. We can extract the information from the .SPRJ file however .SFT is encrypted hence not an easy task to extract information.

This is quite dissapointing as I feel that Softgrid should have provided a way to export the displayed information in some file format.

This makes it so much easy to compare the captured results with other tools e.g. Sysdiff, etc.

Someone figured out how to read some stuff out of the SFT with SFTCheck.

http://www.virtualapp.net/sft-check.html


However I see both sides with this. I think reporting on Sequence contents was not deemed all that important because the need for conflict analysis is not there with virtual applications however from a packaging standpoint this would be a nice to have.

Cheers Mate!!

This was indeed quite helpful. Although the tool doesn't give the information which I was after but it was helpful to understand the logic to extract information.

I will try to extract some more information from the file if possible.

Thanks Again

Cheers,
Vivek

Hi,

I'm the author of the tool kkaminsk pointed to, and I'm happy to report that updated version of sft-check I released last night is now reporting the things you were after, sans registry entries for now.

As it's quite a much updated from previous version, consider it "beta" quality ;-) (I already noticed that there's problem of listing out the blocks, something that I already had as working but...)

br,
Kalle

Hi Kalle,

Thanks for the information. I had contacted you earlier regarding the same through mail.

I will have a look at that.

Can you also suggest what other values can be read from the .sft file?

Cheers,
Vivek