Documenting App-V 5.0 Packages

Continuing our series of posts on the Virtual Engine App-V 5.0 .APPV PowerShell CmdLets, this one will show you how to quickly document your .APPV packages’ contents. The Save-AppV5FileReport cmdlet generates a HTML report of information contained within the .APPV package contents. Here’s an example summary report (detailed reports are also available):

Generating Single Reports

Generating summary reports (such as the one above) simply requires running the following command:

[code]C:\PS> Save-AppV5FileReport –AppV C:\Mozilla_Firefox_v17.0\Mozilla_Firefox_v17.0.appv[/code]

This will generate a Mozilla_Firefox_V17.0_Report.html file in the source C:\Mozilla_Firefox_v17.0\ directory. If we wanted a detailed report instead we could run:

[code]C:\PS> Save-AppV5FileReport –AppV C:\Mozilla_Firefox_v17.0\Mozilla_Firefox_v17.0.appv –Detailed[/code]

Documenting Multiple Packages

Creating a report for a single package is fine, but what if we wanted to document all packages on a share or in a folder? Fortunately this is simple. If you wanted each package report in the source package directory, we can do so like this:

[code]C:\PS> Get-ChildItem C:\Packages\ -Include *.appv -Recurse | % { Save-AppV5FileReport -AppV $_.FullName }

Directory: C:\Packages\GoogleChrome_v23.0.1271.91

Mode                LastWriteTime     Length Name
—-                ————-     —— —-
-a—        02/05/2013     12:36       8884 GoogleChrome_v23.0.1271.91_Report.html

Directory: C:\Packages\Mozilla_Firefox_v17.0

Mode                LastWriteTime     Length Name
—-                ————-     —— —-
-a—        02/05/2013     12:36       8802 Mozilla_Firefox_v17.0_Report.html

Directory: C:\Packages\Paint.Net_v3.5.10

Mode                LastWriteTime     Length Name
—-                ————-     —— —-
-a—        02/05/2013     12:36       8770 Paint.NET_v3.5.10_Report.html[/code]

What about if we wanted all the reports in a single location? Again, pretty straight forward. The Save-AppV5FileReport cmdlet has a –FilePath parameter that we can specify the output location. Note: this folder is not automatically created so make sure it exists! Our command to achieve this is:

[code]C:\PS> Get-ChildItem C:\Packages\ -Include *.appv -Recurse | % { Save-AppV5FileReport -AppV $_.FullName -FilePath C:\Packages\Reports\ }

Directory: C:\Packages\Reports

Mode                LastWriteTime     Length Name
—-                ————-     —— —-
-a—        02/05/2013     12:40       8884 GoogleChrome_v23.0.1271.91_Report.html
-a—        02/05/2013     12:40       8802 Mozilla_Firefox_v17.0_Report.html
-a—        02/05/2013     12:40       8770 Paint.NET_v3.5.10_Report.html[/code]

Hopefully you’ll find these HTML reports useful. We are planning to add sequencer reports into this module in the near future too, so stay tuned! Happy PoShing 😀