Sequencing Deltek Cobra 5.1 with Microsoft App-V 5.0

An issue arises following the sequencing and deployment of Deltek Cobra 5.1 whereby the application fails to launch. After some investigation it turned out that a file named DeltekCobraWorkstation.xml needs to exist within the Cobra 5 installation directory and MUST contain the correct hostname of the machine running the application or it will not launch.

Parameter – <UpdateServer>\\HOSTNAME\CobraWorkstation</UpdateServer>

Obviously this is a problem when using App-V as the hostname of the sequencing machine will be captured within this file during the sequencing process. The solution I used was to write a script which dynamically creates the required file with the correct hostname parameter.

Here is the script I created. You pass it the path and it will generate the file in that location. I didn’t really need to include the ability to pass the path as a parameter as the path ended up just being “..\Root\Cobra 5” however I didn’t realise this when first writing the script as I wasn’t aware that there was an inbuilt folder location that your scripts are stored in by default.

Set objFSO=CreateObject(“Scripting.FileSystemObject”)

‘Get computer name from env variables
set oShell = WScript.CreateObject(“WScript.Shell”)
set oShellEnv = oShell.Environment(“Process”)
computerName = oShellEnv(“ComputerName”)

‘Get file path from parameter and assign to strPath
strPath = WScript.Arguments(0)

‘Create text file overwriting any existing file
if right(strPath, 1) <> “\” then
objFSO.CreateTextFile strPath & “\DeltekCobraWorkstation.xml”, true
else
objFSO.CreateTextFile strPath & “DeltekCobraWorkstation.xml”, true
end if

‘Assign new text file to objFile variable
Set objFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile(strPath & “\DeltekCobraWorkstation.xml”, 2, True)

‘Write a line to the text file
objFile.Write “” & vbCrLf
objFile.Write “” & vbCrLf
objFile.Write ” \\” & computerName & “\CobraWorkstation” & vbCrLf
objFile.Write ” 5.01.746″ & vbCrLf
objFile.Write “”

‘Close the file now we’re done
objFile.Close

I then added the following to the deploymentconfig.xml file and applied it to the App-V application via the management console.

    <UserScripts>
                <StartVirtualEnvironment RunInVirtualEnvironment=”true”>
                                <Path>cscript</Path>
                                <Arguments>writexml.vbs “..\Root\Cobra 5” > %TEMP%\cobra-deploy-log.txt</Arguments>
                                <Wait RollbackOnError=”true” />
                </StartVirtualEnvironment>
    </UserScripts> 

At first I couldn’t get it to work with the sequenced app so I read more into the scripting and found that I had it in the wrong place. I had it in the MachineConfig section under PublishPackage however it needed to be under the UserConfig scripting section and it had to be run as part of StartVirtualEnvironment as this would allow interaction with the Virtual Environment.

To run this script I needed to ensure that scripting had been enabled on the client machines.

Set-AppVClientConfiguration -EnablePackageScripts 1

After that I ran Cobra 5.1 again and the script ran perfectly and brought me to the Cobra logon screen.